Pearl Diver turns anonymous website traffic into identified visitors by combining two data sets and matching them against a large U.S. data cooperative. Here's how that works, how the data stays compliant, and how accurate you can expect it to be.

How Pearl Diver collects visitor data

Two data sets are combined in Pearl Diver:

1. Website visit identification — visitors are identified and matched using an identity resolution graph from one of the largest U.S. data cooperatives, which supplies demographic and firmographic data. The sets are matched to show where your website traffic overlaps with email interactions.
2. Email interaction data — if you've connected Black Pearl Mail's email tracking, Pearl Diver records who receives, opens, and clicks your emails, sourced from email metadata.

🔐 How the data stays compliant

As a member of the data cooperative, Pearl Diver follows a shared governance framework. The key processes are:

1. Data provenance — each member must provide representations and warranties about the origin and legal rights to the data they contribute, captured in membership agreements. The cooperative uses manual and automated reviews, including machine learning, to check that contributed data aligns with the member's business practices.
2. Continuous monitoring — the cooperative uses data observability platforms such as Monte Carlo to monitor data for freshness, volume, and schema consistency, and flags anomalies for review.
3. Privacy and consent management — members must run consent management systems that comply with CCPA and GDPR, tracking and time-stamping consent. The cooperative audits these processes regularly.
4. Third-party audits — the cooperative runs regular third-party audits such as SOC 2, and cloud infrastructure is monitored by trusted partners like AWS.

How accurate the data is

People change jobs, email addresses, and where they live, so data that's accurate when it's collected may not be accurate later. Website visitor data is always moving, and each field is updated with the latest available data from the cooperative. Email interaction data is highly accurate because it comes directly from the company's email routing service. Opens and clicks can be affected by other factors, which Pearl Diver's proprietary algorithms clean.

Common questions

How many visitors will Pearl Diver identify?

On average, only 2–3% of website visitors identify themselves by filling out a form or query. Pearl Diver raises that without asking customers to fill anything in, and typically identifies an average of 20–25% of human visitors, after accounting for bots and non-human traffic. The exact figure varies by customer and time period.

Are identified visitor records unique?

Yes. Each identified record is treated as unique, and when that person visits again, the same record's visit count updates. You'll only see a second record for what looks like the same person if their new visit doesn't match the first, for example a different email address or phone number.

How do you identify visitors in the same household?

Matching starts with browser metadata such as cookies and user-agent data, which identifies a device even when a household shares an IP address. IP matching is used as a secondary method. Prioritizing browser-level signals over shared network identifiers reduces misidentification, and the identity graph is re-indexed regularly with fresh data. Occasional mismatches can still happen with shared devices, but the waterfall approach minimizes the risk.

How do you ensure only U.S. data is collected?

Pearl Diver only stores and works with profiles of individuals based in the USA, and the cooperative only ingests U.S. profiles. Verification includes geolocation checks. If a profile is found to originate outside the USA, it's removed from the databases and warehouses, and the data source is notified to remove it too.

What is the Data Cooperative?

The cooperative receives billions of signals from its members daily to build useful data, with fixed-price access and no dependence on traditional third-party suppliers. For privacy reasons the member companies aren't named, but their categories include email service providers, account-based marketing, demand-side ad platforms, supply-side ad platforms, sales lead accelerators, and marketing automation.

Why are cooperative members anonymous?

Member identities are kept confidential for three reasons: competitive neutrality, since many members are direct competitors; protection from malicious or competitive targeting; and protecting proprietary contributions from being reverse-engineered.

How does Pearl Diver use the cooperative's identity graph without sending your visitor data back?

Your visitor data stays strictly with Pearl Diver and is never shared with the cooperative, including data points from visitor cookies. Pearl Diver resolves identities internally using an identity graph that covers a large share of U.S. adults and businesses, along with over 500 million devices and 2 billion emails.

What is an identity graph?

An identity graph links the identifiers of a person or household across devices, channels, and platforms to build a unified view. It typically includes email addresses, phone numbers, social media handles, cookies, and device IDs, and is used to improve targeting, segmentation, and attribution.

Where does the value of this data come from?

Cooperative data has three advantages:

• It's in active use and corrected daily, rather than sourced from data that quickly goes out of date.
• It keeps growing as the cooperative adds sources and data points.
• The identity graph connects data points that would otherwise be hidden.

All data is stored in the United States: cooperative data in the AWS cloud, and Pearl Diver data in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

How do you identify information for visitors to a website?

There are two parts: identifying attributes of a visit, such as IP address, hashed email, device IDs, and cookies, then matching those attributes to firmographic and demographic data through the identity graph. For Pearl Diver to identify a visitor, the visitor must:

• Be browsing on a device or browser associated with a specific person.
• Exist in the identity graph, meaning their data has been captured in the database. The cooperative doesn't hold data for every U.S. individual.
• Not be suppressed, for example by opting out, using a VPN, or sharing the same email domain as the website (internal staff visits are filtered out so they don't inflate visitor counts).

If any of these aren't met, the visitor isn't de-anonymized and won't appear in your Pearl Diver system.

Need help? Visit the Pearl Diver Help Centre or book a support session with the team.