When publishers think about their identity spine, the focus is often on coverage, accuracy, and match rates. But there is another dimension that’s just as critical, and often overlooked: flexibility.

Your audience data, your AdTech stack, and your business goals are always evolving. What you decide today as your “primary” identifiers might not be the right choice six months from now. The question is, when those needs change, do you have the freedom to adapt on your terms, or are you locked into a costly, time-consuming rebuild?

The problem with rigid graphs

In most identity graph implementations, the structure is fixed the moment data is ingested. Your linkage rules, such as which IDs are considered primary and which are fallback, are baked into the schema. If you want to make a change, you often need to:

• Re-ingest and re-process your entire visitor dataset
• Rebuild linkages from scratch
• Pause other projects while the engineering team manages the migration

For publishers managing large volumes of historical and real-time 1st party data, this rigidity creates operational drag. Every re-ingest is costly in terms of infrastructure resources, internal effort, and time to market.

Flexibility by design with Optable

With Optable, flexibility is built into the core of how identity resolution works. You can change primary identifiers at any time, adjust linkage rules to accommodate new data sources or advertising use cases, and apply different scopes of resolution. Scopes give you the freedom to tailor how identity is managed for different objectives, ensuring that activation and enrichment each work the way you need, without reloading or migrating data.

The Optable platform is built around schema on read. Instead of locking your data into a rigid structure when it is ingested, the platform continuously evaluates and resolves your ID graph data into a normalized list of visitor records based on your latest configuration every time it is accessed.

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Why schema on read matters

For the non-technical stakeholders among us, schema on read means the platform interprets the data’s structure at query time rather than load time. This is especially advantageous in a fragmented publisher environment because it:

• Works with mixed data sources, including batch, real-time, and warehoused
• Adapts instantly when new identifiers or linkages are introduced
• Avoids downtime and heavy ETL cycles when changes are needed

For programmatic and yield leaders, this translates into agility. You can test new audience strategies, onboard different partners, or pivot targeting rules without waiting on long engineering sprints.

Adapting as you learn

Your identity strategy will evolve as you learn. You might start with hashed emails as your primary key, then later shift to a deterministic on-site identifier, or you might add probabilistic linkages for specific activation use cases.

With a flexible identity graph hosted by Optable, those changes are configuration updates, not re-architecture projects. Scopes make this adaptability even more powerful: you can fine-tune identity resolution for one use case without disrupting another. That means you can test, learn, and optimize with confidence, improving performance while keeping operations streamlined.

The takeaway

A flexible identity graph is not just a technical convenience; it’s a business advantage. It allows you to:

• Respond faster to changes in data availability and privacy regulations
• Unlock new monetization and activation use cases faster
• Align identity resolution with your business goals using configurable scopes
• Reduce the operational overhead of managing your audience data

If you are building or rethinking your identity solution, ask yourself: will this graph adapt with me, or will it hold me back? With Optable, you can ensure it is built to adapt.

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