Known devices

About known devices in the Device Graph.

In the Device Graph, we have the concept of a known device. A known device is a device a customer uses to interact with your brand.

NOTE

In the Adobe Experience Cloud Device Co-op, terms such as device, person, identity etc. have specific meanings. For example, “device” can refer to physical hardware such as a phone or tablet and the applications that run on that hardware. See the glossary for definitions.

Supporting goals with the known device

The known device concept supports a few goals essential to the creation and maintenance of an effective Device Co-op program. A known device is one that a Device Co-op member knows about from some interaction with a consumer (e.g., a site visit or by using a mobile app). Based on these actions, the Device Graph links the known devices of a Device Co-op member to devices contributed by other Device Co-op members. These links can be deterministic or probabilistic. This benefits Device Co-op members because they receive:

More data about their known devices.
New information about other, linked devices.

The Device Graph will not provide information about device-clusters that a Device Co-op member has not seen.

Device Co-op goals

Three main goals animate the Device Co-op. These include:

Scale: Share the maximum number of possible links across a variety of use cases.
Fairness: Ensure that each member of the Device Co-op benefits in a manner commensurate with their contributions.
Consumer trust: Maintain and build consumer confidence by making sure the consumer cross-device experience involves brands they already know and trust.

Scale and the known device

The following methods are the more common ways a device qualifies as a known device. Given these methods, Device Co-op members will almost always have at least 1 known device. This supports the goal of providing maximum scale to all the members of the Device Co-op.

Organic

From a customer’s visit to your site or by using your app. This is qualification from first-party data.
By on-boarding customers from a CRM system.

Marketplace

Purchasing segment data from Audience Marketplace.
From purchasing data from a third-party data provider.

Advertising

By winning inventory in an auction and serving an ad to a device. The device becomes a known device if that ad contains an Audience Manager pixel.

Known devices and fairness use cases

Members of the Device Co-op get links commensurate with their contributions to the Device Graph. Companies that contribute a lot of devices to the Device Graph receive more links than members who contribute just a few. We believe this helps make the Device Co-op fair for all its members. Let’s look at how this works with the large and small use cases described below.

Brand A: large use case

In this example, Brand A has 100 site visitors each month and starts a new cross-device, brand campaign. For simplicity, assume the Device Graph knows all of the visitors to Brand A are linked to 1 additional device. This means Brand A could reach another 100 devices. Additionally, the Device Graph contains about 200 devices linked together.

Known Devices/Month	Linked Devices Received from Device Co-op	Total Devices for Campaign
100	100	200

Brand B: Small Use Case

In this example, Brand B has 100 site visitors each month and starts a new cross-device, brand campaign. For simplicity, assume the Device Graph knows all of the visitors to Brand B are linked to 50 additional devices. This means Brand B could reach 150 devices. Additionally, the Device Graph contains about 1,000 devices linked together.