What is an identity graph?

An identity graph is a structured database that aggregates various identifiers like email addresses, device IDs, and loyalty numbers into a single, persistent profile for each consumer, allowing marketers to recognize the same person across multiple platforms and interfaces without exposing personally identifiable information. By using both deterministic and probabilistic matching techniques, identity graphs enhance personalization, reduce media waste, and improve measurement, while ensuring privacy and compliance with regulations like GDPR. These graphs operate in near real-time, enabling immediate personalization, and are maintained through ongoing data governance to balance accuracy, reach, and privacy. They support various marketing applications, including customer journey mapping, audience management, and personalization, while facing challenges such as maintaining precision and privacy. Aerospike offers a solution for building scalable, real-time identity graphs that can handle petabytes of data with low latency and high consistency.