Through the 2010s, data management platforms (DMPs) were a popular category of advertising software. These tools collect browsing data tied to online tracking cookies and device IDs, then sort millions of anonymous people into segments (like “new parents” or “in the market for a new electric stove”) that advertisers can target. This third-party data changed hands with little oversight, being sold and resold, with big firms racing to buy in: For example, Oracle acquired the DMP BlueKai in 2014, and Salesforce paid $700 million for the DMP Krux in 2016.
But then the online rules changed as privacy became a mainstream concern. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect in 2018 and required companies to get consent before tracking people across the web. California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) came in 2020 and gave consumers the right to opt out of the sale of personal information. Internet browsers tightened things, too: Safari and Firefox now block third-party cookies by default, though Chrome has kept them in place for now.
Each change has shrunk the data that enabled DMPs to function, and as demand fell, several of the biggest DMPs shut down. Read on to understand what a DMP does, which companies still provide one, and why your online store may be better off collecting first-party data with a customer data platform (CDP) instead.
What is a data management platform (DMP)?
A data management platform (DMP) is a platform that builds audiences for advertisers from anonymous browsing data aggregated from internet users. Websites carry small pieces of tracking code that record what visitors browse and drop a cookie—a small ID file—in each visitor’s browser. The DMP collects that activity and recognizes each visitor by their cookie. Then it sorts those cookies into groups based on behavior, like “cat owners” or “planning a cruise.”
For years, this helped advertisers. Before DMPs, an advertiser had to guess how to best reach their target audience—for example, by placing shoe ads on a running magazine’s website. DMPs enabled advertisers to target individuals. A shoe brand could buy ads aimed only at people whose browsing showed they were shopping for sneakers, and its ads would reach them on whatever site they visited next.
Now, however, as browsers increasingly block third-party cookies and privacy laws restrict their use, this category of software is waning. Meanwhile, 62% of brand marketers say first-party data will become increasingly important to their strategies, shifting away from reliance on third-party data altogether.
Customer data platform vs. data management platform
A customer data platform collects information that customers actually opt to share with your business. That includes data points like product orders, feedback, and support messages, combined into one profile per person and tied to something like an email address or phone number. Those profiles can then power your owned marketing channels, including SMS campaigns and website product recommendations. Customer data profiles stay accurate for as long as someone remains a shopper with your business. The data belongs to you, and you have consent to use it.
A data management platform provides none of the above. The audiences you target stay anonymous, so no names or emails ever enter your customer database or CRM. Your competitors can also buy the same segments and run the same advertising plays. The spending doesn’t give you anything permanent either; stop paying for a subscription, and the audience disappears.
Key functions of a data management platform
A DMP handles a few different tasks. For example, take a camping gear brand that sells tents: If their ideal customers are people planning a backpacking trip, they might use a DMP, which does the following:
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Collects the clicks. The DMP pulls in browsing activity from tracking code installed across websites and apps. If someone scrolls through a trail guide on a hiking blog and watches a tent review on a gear site, both visits get logged against their cookie.
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Enriches profiles with purchased data. The advertiser can purchase granular details about those cookies from external data brokers through the platform’s marketplace. The camping gear brand might add an estimated income bracket to find buyers more likely to spend on their premium tents than their entry-level ones.
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Segments millions of cookies into audiences. The platform sorts cookies with similar online browsing activity into grouped audiences. That hiking blog reader might end up in a group labeled “outdoor enthusiasts,” along with millions of others.
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Finds lookalikes. The platform can also find cookies whose browsing looks similar to an existing audience, much in the same way as lookalike audiences on Facebook and other ad platforms.
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Activates the audience. The DMP hands its finished audiences to separate ad-buying software, which the brand uses to purchase ad space across the web. The brand’s tent ads then start appearing on other sites its targeted audience visits.
How to use Shopify as a DMP alternative
If you run an online store, you probably don’t need a data management platform for your advertising efforts. Instead, you can use a customer data platform to help unify all the information you’re already collecting with consent, including browsing activity on your site and email subscribers from your forms.
Shopify provides first-party customer data management with every plan. The ecommerce platform automatically creates a customer profile when someone orders or joins your mailing list, and customer segments group those profiles with filters like amount spent, products purchased, last order date, and even a predicted spend tier.
You can send a campaign to any segment through Shopify Messaging or create a discount code just for that group. With Shopify Analytics, you get access to more than 200 reports. You also won’t need to onboard a full-time data analyst; Sidekick, an AI assistant, can help you build reports and segments from plain-language requests.
For example, the British clothing brand Belstaff moved to Shopify as part of an overhaul of its aging systems, replacing a complicated point-of-sale and ecommerce setup with just one platform. “IT transformation starts with data centralization,” Navid Jilow, Belstaff’s director of technology, says on an episode of theShopify Masters podcast. “That helps us build that customer profile up rather than having some of these bits missing in our data.” Now a shopper who buys in-store and again online shows up as one profile.
Data management platforms for ecommerce
Oracle discontinued all its advertising products, including its DMP, in 2024. Salesforce shut down its Audience Studio the same year and deleted the data it held.
As advertisers focus on collecting first-party data and porting it over to customer data platforms, the list of working DMPs is shrinking. Those that remain have largely repositioned around first-party data, cookieless tracking, and adopting privacy-first practices. Here’s what’s on the market:
Lotame
Founded in 2006, Lotame ran one of the best-known DMPs for nearly two decades. After its 2025 sale to Publicis, it operates under the Epsilon brand with a repositioned lineup.
Addressable Audiences is their remaining data marketplace product; it has more than 5,000 ready-made segments through the Lotame Data Exchange, plus curated marketplaces matched to brand-safe ad inventory.
Lotame’s flagship product, Spherical, is a data collaboration platform: It ingests a company’s first-party data, enriches it with partner segments, and targets the resulting audiences across channels. Its Data & Identity Services match a company’s customer records to digital identifiers like cookies and connected TV IDs.
Permutive
Permutive was built for publishers, and instead of following people across the web with third-party cookies, it builds audiences from what readers do on each publisher’s own site.
Advertisers plug in through its data clean room, a system that matches two companies’ data without either side handing over its records. This feature connects brands with more than 150 publishers. If display ads are part of your marketing and cookie blocking keeps shrinking your reach, this is the cookieless version of what a classic DMP sold.
The Adex
The Adex DMP comes from Virtual Minds, a German ad tech company. The platform pulls data from multiple sources into segments you can analyze and push into cross-device campaigns, with connections to outside data marketplaces for enrichment.
Its distinguishing pitch is legal certainty: Everything runs under German and European data protection rules, which matters if you sell into the EU and want your ad stack to comply.
Weborama
Weborama is a French platform whose core product is a hybrid DMP/CDP, tying third-party browsing data and a company’s own customer records to a single ID instead of keeping them in separate systems. It holds more than 200 million behavioral profiles by its own count, and its semantic engine reads the content of over 500 million web pages to sort audiences by interest.
Data stays hosted in the EU, and the platform is designed to be GDPR compliant. Of everything on this list, it’s probably the closest thing to a traditional DMP.
Audigent
Audigent, owned by Experian, isn’t a DMP, but it gets advertisers to the same place: audiences of likely buyers they’ve never met. Rather than selling platform access, it packages its more than 400,000 audience segments into curated ad deals you buy through the ad-buying software you already use.
The data comes from opted-in partnerships with publishers and companies like Condé Nast and Warner Music Group, linked by its Hadron ID system instead of cookies. You never log into a DMP, since the targeting arrives already attached to the ad inventory.
Data management platform FAQ
What is a data management platform?
A data management platform is a type of advertising software that gathers data about internet users’ browsing habits (linked to cookies and device identifiers) to segment them anonymously for targeting. Unlike customer data-based systems, a DMP can work with users who don’t interact with an advertiser’s brand at all.
What are the best data management platforms?
Few remain, but Permutive, The Adex, and Weborama still sell some version of a DMP, while Oracle and Salesforce shut theirs down in 2024.
What is DMP vs. CDP?
DMPs build temporary pools of anonymous data to serve ads. The data comes from other companies’ websites, so they cannot identify users on your website. CDPs build persistent user profiles of real people based on data from your website. They power marketing emails, text messages, website personalization, and retargeting ad placements.
How is a DMP different from a CRM?
A CRM (customer relationship management system) keeps records of the individual people your business deals with, like contact details and order history. A DMP never deals with individuals at all, just anonymous segments assembled for ad campaigns.
