Gartner: What to search for in a buyer knowledge platform
Buyer knowledge platforms (CDPs) first gained recognition amongst advertising and marketing customers because the know-how tackled the advertising and marketing operate’s advanced buyer knowledge administration challenges. These challenges included centralising knowledge assortment and unifying buyer knowledge from disparate sources into profiles that might then be segmented and activated throughout the advertising and marketing know-how (martech) ecosystem.
Gartner defines CDPs as software program functions that assist advertising and marketing and buyer expertise use instances by unifying an organization’s buyer knowledge from advertising and marketing and different channels. Buyer knowledge platforms optimise the timing and concentrating on of messages, provides and buyer engagement actions, and allow the evaluation of individual-level buyer behaviour over time.
The client knowledge platform buying course of includes a number of stakeholders. In accordance with a 2025 survey of enterprise consumers by Gartner, the common variety of teams offering funding for CDP purchases is 5, with two to 3 teams sometimes contributing to the necessities and goals.
CDPs orchestrate quite a lot of enterprise functions and buyer relationship administration (CRM) techniques, enabling companies to boost and higher coordinate go-to-market (GTM) execution – for instance, unified business motions for business-to-business (B2B) and buyer journey orchestration for business-to-consumer (B2C) enterprise.
Since their inception, CDPs have garnered important adoption, with 68% of respondents to a 2024 Gartner survey of promoting analytics and know-how indicating their organisation has a CDP, and one other 18% responding that they’re within the means of deploying one.
Pulling collectively knowledge
The aim of a buyer knowledge platform is to centralise knowledge assortment and unify buyer knowledge from disparate sources into profiles. CDPs allow analysts and knowledge engineers to carry out knowledge administration duties that assist higher-order enterprise processes, primarily advertising and marketing, however more and more cross-CRM capabilities, in addition to finance and product administration.
A CDP has the potential to offer important worth to advertising and marketing and adjoining capabilities, unifying buyer knowledge and enabling enterprise customers to activate wealthy knowledge and insights throughout channels, gadgets and enterprise knowledge functions by governing the bidirectional circulation of information between the entrance workplace and again workplace.
Nevertheless, whereas it isn’t an alternative choice to enterprise grasp knowledge administration, a CDP can be sure that buyer profile knowledge, transactional occasions and analytic attributes can be found to advertising and marketing and different customer-facing capabilities for coordinating interactions.
Enterprise software program with CDP capabilities
There’s a important divide within the CDP market between enterprise utility suppliers (EAPs), significantly these in CRM or ERP, that supply CDPs as a part of a platform method, and suppliers with extra standalone choices. Chief advertising and marketing officers (CMOs) should make the strategic choice between selecting a platform supplier versus a standalone CDP providing.
Gartner has recognized a lot of crucial capabilities {that a} CDP wants to offer. These embody knowledge assortment, buyer profile unification, integrations, segmentation, experimentation, and knowledge science and privateness, amongst others.
Knowledge assortment is the method of ingesting (extracting) first-party, individual-level buyer knowledge from a number of sources and codecs, each on-line and offline. Some CDPs might provide software program improvement kits and/or tags/pixels to facilitate knowledge assortment and function a central level of ingestion for knowledge processing. Knowledge ought to persist for so long as wanted for processing, and is often left unchanged in its authentic supply. This contains each nameless and recognized first-party identifiers, behaviours and attributes.
Together with knowledge assortment, a CDP also needs to present the flexibility to connect with and alternate knowledge, directions or segments with different instruments, applications, apps and channels to allow advertising and marketing channel execution. This will likely embody integrations to cross-functional instruments supporting buyer expertise (CX). Knowledge interoperability with cloud knowledge warehouses and lakehouse designs are rising differentiating options of CDPs.
Knowledge collaboration is recognized by Gartner as one other function of a CDP, which provides productised entry to second and/or third-party business datasets, akin to demographic, intent, firmographic or technographic knowledge. Superior capabilities might embody a named partnership with an information clear room or the flexibility to entry it throughout the CDP setting.
Buyer profile unification is the place the CDP consolidates profiles on the individual stage – generally on the family stage – and connects attributes to identities. This should embody linking a number of gadgets to a single particular person, as soon as that individual has been recognized, and deduplicating buyer data. The method for identification decision varies. Options might use deterministic matching and/or probabilistic identification graphs, and should have further partnerships with third-party identification decision suppliers to additional advance this functionality.
Segmentation permits entrepreneurs to create and handle segments or audiences. Primary choices assist rule-based phase creation, typically with out-of-the-box predictive fashions, whereas superior choices assist dynamic segmentation, leveraging real-time knowledge to maneuver particular person buyer profiles out and in of segments as their actions meet beforehand outlined standards. Superior options can also embody automated phase discovery and the usage of synthetic intelligence (AI), machine studying (ML) and/or giant language fashions (LLMs).
A CDP additionally wants to offer efficiency evaluation for varied ranges of buyer knowledge, akin to on the attribute stage, profile stage or phase stage, typically with out-of-the-box dashboards and templates for studies. Choices might embody knowledge monitoring and knowledge high quality assessments. Experimentation and knowledge science fundamental choices embody testing, akin to A/B or multivariate assessments, to observe and self-optimise the shopper expertise based mostly on the successful marketing campaign phase.
Superior choices might embody further options, akin to real-time experimentation and the flexibility to import and handle ML fashions throughout the CDP utilizing R or Python. They could embody integrations with knowledge science or LLM options, and supply the flexibility to hold out granular configuration of scoring and prediction.
Adoption outdoors advertising and marketing
Demand for CDPs rose out of promoting’s want to deal with advanced buyer knowledge administration challenges with out lengthy wait instances for IT ticket resolutions, however the scope of this know-how has expanded considerably. CDP suppliers started so as to add extra personalisation, buyer journey orchestration and predictive capabilities to distinguish in a busy market. Since then, there was additional differentiation by improvements in knowledge sharing, AI mannequin improvement and LLM-based performance.
So, whereas CDPs originated to serve advertising and marketing use instances, curiosity from knowledge administration roles, IT and different customer-facing enterprise consumer roles, akin to gross sales, service and assist, is on the rise. General, Gartner recommends carefully evaluating CDP suppliers’ capabilities as advertising and marketing know-how utilisation is trending downwards, dropping from 58% in 2020 to simply 33% in 2023. In actual fact, in 2024, entrepreneurs solely used 53% of CDP capabilities, on common.
This text is an excerpt of Gartner’s “Important capabilities for buyer knowledge platforms” report by Rachel Smith, a senior principal analyst at Gartner.
