Match rate
Match rate is the percentage of records in an audience that a platform manages to recognise as its own users when the audience is uploaded.
If a brand uploads a list of 100,000 customers to a social network and the platform identifies 45,000, the match rate is 45%. The other 55,000 are not lost through a fault: they may use a different email on that platform, have no account or not have given consent, or the original record may be misspelt or out of date. That is why the result varies widely with the type of identifier (email, phone number, mobile ad ID) and the platform.
It is a figure worth asking for before planning, because it sets the real size of the audience. A segment of one million people with a 30% match rate shrinks to 300,000 reachable people, and frequency and budget are worked out from there. It can be improved by cleaning and normalising data before uploading it, providing more than one identifier per person and using identity resolution services.
