Understanding Enrichment Coverage

Decile enriches your customers with demographic and lifestyle attributes — details like age, household income, location, and interests — by matching them against a third-party enrichment provider. This article explains what your match rate means, why individual attribute enrichment rates vary, and why the overall match rate isn't the same as the coverage of any single attribute.

What is enrichment?

Enrichment is the process of adding third-party demographic and lifestyle information to your customer records. On its own, your ecommerce data tells you what customers bought. Enrichment adds context about who they are — the attributes that power personas, segments, and analysis across Decile.

To do this, Decile sends your customers to an enrichment provider, which looks them up in its own large database and returns whatever attributes it has on file for each person.

Your overall match rate

The overall match rate is the share of your customers that the enrichment provider is able to recognize at all. If a customer is found in the provider's database, they're considered matched and can receive enrichment attributes. If they can't be found, they aren't matched and won't have enrichment data.

For example, an 80% match rate means the provider recognized 80% of your customers and could return at least some information for them. The remaining 20% couldn't be matched — often because the identifying details on file don't line up with anyone in the provider's database, or because that person simply isn't well represented in it.

The match rate is your ceiling: a customer has to be matched before any individual attribute can be filled in.

Why individual attributes have their own rates

Being matched doesn't mean the provider knows everything about a person. Each attribute — age, income, homeownership, and so on — has its own enrichment rate: the share of your customers for whom that specific attribute is known.

These rates vary from one attribute to the next, for a few reasons:

Some attributes are simply more widely available than others. Common details like age or location tend to be known for most matched customers, while more specialized attributes — such as whether someone has an interest in antiques or has donated to a health cause — are known for fewer.
Not every matched person has every field. The provider may recognize a customer but only hold a subset of attributes for them, leaving other fields blank.
Some attributes are inferred or modeled, which means they're only populated when the provider has enough signal to make a confident estimate.

As a result, one attribute might be present for nearly everyone who matched, while another is present for only a portion of them.

Why the match rate isn't an attribute's coverage

It's natural to expect the overall match rate to apply to every attribute, but it's helpful to keep the two ideas separate. The match rate reflects how many customers could be enriched, not how complete any single field ends up being.

The match rate tells you how many customers could be enriched. Each attribute's own rate tells you how many actually have a value for that field. Because not every matched customer carries every attribute, an individual attribute's coverage is almost always lower than the overall match rate — never higher.

A simple way to picture it:

Overall match rate → "How many of my customers did the provider recognize?"
Attribute enrichment rate → "How many of my customers have a known value for this specific attribute?"

So if your match rate is 80% but the income attribute is known for 55% of your customers, both figures are correct. The 80% is the pool of people who could be enriched; the 55% is how many of them have a known income specifically. When you're judging how reliable an analysis is, look at the enrichment rate for the attributes it actually uses — not the overall match rate.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between match rate and attribute enrichment rate? The match rate is the share of your customers the provider can recognize at all. An attribute enrichment rate is the share of your customers who have a known value for one specific attribute. The match rate is the overall ceiling; each attribute's rate sits at or below it.

Why don't all my customers get enriched? A customer has to be found in the enrichment provider's database first. Some can't be matched — usually because their identifying details don't line up with a record in the provider's data, or they aren't well represented in it.

Why is one attribute more complete than another? Attributes come from different sources and vary in how widely available they are. Some are known for almost every matched customer; others are known for fewer, or are only filled in when the provider can estimate them confidently.

Can an individual attribute have higher coverage than my overall match rate? No. A customer must be matched before any attribute can be filled in, so an attribute's coverage can never exceed the overall match rate — it's typically lower.

Which number should I trust when reviewing an analysis? Look at the enrichment rate of the specific attributes the analysis relies on. The overall match rate tells you how many customers could be enriched, but it doesn't reflect how complete any single attribute is.