Collaborate

Collaborate is a privacy-safe data collaboration module that allows two organisations to run joint audience analyses and activate insights — without either party ever sharing raw customer data with the other. Built on Google BigQuery’s Analytics Hub infrastructure, Collaborate lets organisations bring their own datasets together, measure how their audiences overlap, and act on those insights for advertising campaigns. Neither side can access the other’s underlying records, view individual-level data, or export raw data outside the controlled environment.

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Use cases

Collaborate supports three core use cases. A partnership can be used for one or all three, depending on what you and your partner agree to enable.

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Discover

Understand how your audience overlaps with your partner’s — and what those shared customers look like. Run an overlap analysis to see how many records match between the two datasets, broken down by shared demographic or behavioural attributes (such as gender, age group, or purchase category). This tells you the size and composition of your shared audience without either side exposing individual records.

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Activate

Save matched segments as audiences and push them to advertising channels for targeting. Once you have run an overlap analysis, the Subscriber can save the matched population — or specific breakdowns of it — as an audience in Zeotap CDP. That audience can then be activated to any channel the Contributor has permitted, such as a DSP or paid social platform.

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Suppress

Identify customers in your dataset who were not reached by your partner — for exclusion targeting or incrementality measurement. The suppression view shows the non-overlapping portion of the Subscriber’s audience. This is useful for building exclusion lists (avoid showing ads to people already reached), measuring incremental reach (how much new audience did the partnership unlock?), and managing frequency across channels.

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What you can do in Collaborate

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How it works

A Collaborate partnership always involves two roles. The partnership follows a structured setup before analysis can begin:

1. The Contributor creates the partnership — an invitation email is sent immediately to the CDP admins of the Subscriber organisation.
2. The Contributor configures which attributes to share and sets privacy controls.
3. The Subscriber accepts the invitation — the partnership status moves to In Setup.
4. The Subscriber maps their identity keys to the Contributor’s, completing their configuration.
5. Once both sides have submitted, the partnership becomes Active.
6. The Subscriber runs analysis to view overlap/suppression results and activate relevant segments.

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Partnership status lifecycle

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Which role are you?

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Prerequisites

Complete these before attempting to create or join a partnership. Admin tasks — completed once per organisation

• Confirm your organisation is on the Zeotap composable CDP plan (a warehouse-native BigQuery setup is required for both sides). To be a Subscriber, your organisation must be composable.
• Request the Collaborate module to be enabled for your org, and enable collaboration consent — contact your Zeotap account team. Only consenting organisations appear in the partner selection dropdown.

Contributor tasks — before creating a partnership

• Confirm at least one composable data source is onboarded in your org.
• Confirm that source contains at least one ID-type attribute (for example, Email MD5 or Phone MD5) or a primary key column, to serve as the join key.

Subscriber tasks — before accepting a partnership

• Confirm you have onboarded a dataset as a customer parent model in your org. This is required for overlap analysis — the join key of the customer parent model lets the system resolve user profiles for matching.
• Ensure your org’s CDP admins are monitoring their inbox — they receive the invitation email when a Contributor creates a partnership with your org.

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Core concepts

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Related guides