• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, May 3, 2016

Marketers are consistently challenged to directly connect how online ads facilitate offline purchases. A new partnership between LiveRamp, a provider of data connectivity, and ThinkVine, a provider of marketing attribution and optimization services, seeks to confront that challenge.

ThinkVine and LiveRamp, an Acxiom company, on Tuesday announced they will partner to offer clients a data solution that seeks to enable omnichannel attribution to solve the online advertising/offline purchase challenge.

The partnership will offer ThinkVine customers such as Deckers and Urban Outfitters the use of LiveRamp’s anonymous linking technology to connect their offline sales transaction data and third-party data to online campaign impressions at the consumer level.

“Linking online marketing with offline sales provides much-needed visibility into marketing’s current impact and future potential,” ThinkVine CEO Damon Ragusa told Real-Time Daily via email.

“Customer journeys are increasingly complex, spanning multiple channels and devices over time,” Travis May, President and GM of LiveRamp, told Real-Time Daily via email. “By linking data at the individual level, LiveRamp’s data connectivity technology enables ThinkVine to provide clients with a highly accurate, people-based approach to measurement that draws insights from an omni-channel view of the customer.”

Omnichannel attribution is a hot button topic as brands seek to understand the best way to allocate their marketing budgets. Marketers are trying to connect data across multiple customer touchpoints to enable deeper insights and inform better business decisions.

LiveRamp connects more than 300 digital marketing platforms and data providers. Last week, Carrefour Media partnered with LiveRamp to onboard data from consumer products goods companies that sell through Carrefour Markets. Onboarding data is a means of connecting data across multiple silos.

The partnership will enable media agencies to use consumer package goods companies’ first-party data to target consumers with ads.