Retail case study

The retail identity gap is costing you money. Here's how we closed it.

Across Target, Camping World, and Aldi, Deep Sync turned incomplete CRMs and anonymous transactions into fully addressable customers, with measurable lift on every platform that matters.

Segment
Retail & grocery
Solutions
Profile Enrichment · Transaction Matching
Clients
Target · Camping World · Aldi
+20%
Digital addressability lift across five activation platforms.
83.5%
Camping World match rate, with 4.9× device IDs per customer.
32M
Aldi transactions resolved in a single month, no loyalty program.
The retail identity gap

Most of your revenue is happening in the dark

Every day, millions of shoppers walk into stores, tap their cards, and leave without ever telling you who they are. They buy. They return. They churn. And the data they leave behind is a receipt, not a relationship. That silent chasm between what your data contains and what your marketing needs is the Retail Identity Gap, and it has a direct revenue cost.

95%
Anonymous transactions
Of in-store buyers leave no identity trace at the register.
1 in 4
Broken CRM activation
CRM records fail to match on any ad platform you spend on.
5%
Loyalty blind spots
Loyalty programs capture as little as 5% of actual purchase behavior.

Organizations lose 15–25% of annual revenue to poor data quality. The gap is not theoretical. It is measured in real media spend, real lost customers, and real wasted budget. Deep Sync closes it with two complementary capabilities: Profile Enrichment turns the customers you know into reachable ones, and Transaction Matching turns anonymous buyers into known people. Together they make your entire customer universe addressable.

Case 01 · Profile Enrichment · Target

The world's best retail CRM still had a 26% blind spot

If a data problem could be solved by having more data, Target would have solved it long ago. They had 141.7 million customer records, a world-class loyalty program, and decades of purchase history. Yet when they uploaded their CRM to the platforms where they spend media, roughly 1 in 4 customers did not match, not because the customers weren't real, but because the identifiers were incomplete.

Target partnered with Deep Sync (via LiveRamp) to enrich their full CRM file and test the impact across five major activation platforms, quantifying lift in both match rates and actual audience size.

141.7M
Records enriched
The full Target CRM file, the largest retail enrichment of its kind.
+177M
More devices on Google
Incremental device connections unlocked on Google alone.
+20%
Addressability lift
More of Target's own customers reached across 5 platforms, same budget.
Platform match-rate lift · original file vs. Deep Sync enriched
PlatformOriginalAfter Deep SyncLift
Google Customer Match74%84%+10 pts
Devices reached (Google)792.9M970.3M+177.4M
Meta (Facebook / Instagram)69–81%89–104%+ up to 23 pts
Pinterest71%81%+10 pts
Snapchat65%77%+12 pts
UID2 (The Trade Desk)51%66%+15 pts

"The same file. The same customers. But after Deep Sync, Target could reach 177 million more devices on Google alone. That is not a marginal improvement, that is a fundamentally different marketing capability."

CE
Case 02 · Profile Enrichment · Camping World

83.5% match rate and 4.9× device IDs per customer

Target showed what enrichment does to platform match rates. Camping World shows what it does to reach depth, how many digital surfaces you unlock per customer once their profile is complete. The largest U.S. retailer of RVs and outdoor gear brought a CRM of nearly 885,000 records, their most valuable marketing asset.

The question wasn't just how many could be matched, it was how much bigger each match could become across devices, phones, emails, and IP addresses.

83.5%
Overall match rate
With all 19 matching rules active, leaving fewer than 1 in 6 unaddressable.
4.9×
Device ID multiplier
Nearly five device identifiers returned per matched customer.
1.28M
UUIDs appended
Unique device IDs from 510K matched records, a 2.5× expansion of coverage.
The takeaway for every retailer

The 4.9× device multiplier is the headline. For every customer Deep Sync matches, nearly five device identifiers come back, meaning one known person becomes reachable across nearly five digital surfaces. That is how a CRM of 700K turns into an addressable audience of 3.5M+ digital touchpoints.

Case 03 · Transaction Matching · Aldi

Turning 43.8 million anonymous transactions into real people

Profile Enrichment makes known customers reachable. Transaction Matching makes unknown customers visible. Aldi is the proof that the second problem is solvable at grocery scale, without a loyalty program, an app, or any customer opt-in.

As a low-friction grocery model, Aldi processes over 43 million in-store transactions every month, and before Deep Sync roughly 95% had no identity attached. They were commercially invisible. The standard answer, launching a loyalty program, is a multi-year, multi-million dollar undertaking. Deep Sync resolves identity from the transaction signal itself.

32M
Transactions resolved
In a single month, in one production run, with no loyalty program required.
~70%
Resolution rate
Roughly 7 in 10 anonymous transactions resolved to a real, known individual.
3×
Match passes
Loyalty signal, card-level match, then store catchment, each catching what the last missed.
The grocery identity waterfall · monthly volume
Match passTransactions resolvedCumulative match rate
1 · Loyalty signal match~9.6M22.8%
2 · Card & payment match~3.3M30.6%
3 · Store catchment match~18.1M73.0%
Total resolved~32M~70%

"By resolving roughly 70% of those buyers into known, addressable individuals, Deep Sync transformed invisible purchase activity into measurable customer intelligence, personalization, suppression, attribution, and retargeting that were impossible before."

CE

Three retailers. Three problems. One outcome.

More identity unlocks more reach, more measurement, and more revenue. Whether you start with a world-class CRM like Target, a high-value niche file like Camping World, or no loyalty data at all like Aldi, the deterministic graph closes the gap, and the gap is costing you money every day it goes unmeasured.

Want to know what your data is actually worth?

We run a free match test against your CRM, loyalty, or transaction file and deliver a side-by-side lift report across Google, Meta, UID2, and more. Free. No commitment. Results in days.