Understanding Resolution Rates

Summary: The all-traffic event rate reflects every pixel fire, so bots, cookieless requests, international traffic, and highly active sessions can move it sharply. The addressable rate uses directly measured US, cookied traffic that was not classified as a bot. Safari and iOS remain in the browser breakdown because they can resolve, but cookie restrictions usually make their rates much lower.

What Is a Resolution Rate?

When someone visits your website, the Delivr pixel fires an event. If we can match that visitor to a real person in our identity graph, that event is resolved -- meaning we know who they are (name, email, company, job title, etc.).

Your resolution rate is the percentage of events that get resolved.

How to Read the Number

Not all website traffic comes from people who can be identified. Your all-traffic rate includes everything, including repeated events from the same cookie:

flowchart TD
    A["All Raw Traffic (100%)"] --> B["Remove classified bots"]
    B --> C["Remove cookieless requests"]
    C --> D["Remove non-US and unknown-country traffic"]
    D --> E["Directly measured addressable traffic"]
    E --> F["Resolved addressable events"]

    style A fill:#6b7280,color:#fff
    style E fill:#3b82f6,color:#fff
    style F fill:#22c55e,color:#fff

The addressable view includes US visitors with a usable cookie that were not classified as bots. It is counted directly from the event eligibility predicate. It is not reconstructed by subtracting dashboard buckets, because categories such as bot and international can overlap.

Think of it like email open rates: the headline number includes a lot of recipients who never see the email (spam filters, inactive accounts), making the rate look lower than reality.

Resolution Rates by Browser

These are typical ranges. Your actual rates depend on your site's traffic mix.

The Apple factor: About 36-40% of US browser traffic comes from Safari or iOS devices. This is an industry-wide limitation that affects every identity resolution provider, not just Delivr.

Event Rate vs. Cookie Rate vs. Resolved Identifier Count

You may see two rate metrics and a resolved-identifier count. They measure different things:

Cookie rate: What percentage of distinct cookie IDs resolved?

A cookie is a browser identifier, not a guaranteed unique person. One person can have multiple cookies across browsers, devices, resets, or privacy expiry. The cookie rate removes the event-frequency weighting, so one hyperactive session does not count dozens of times.

Event rate: What percentage of total events resolved?

This weights active sessions more heavily because every pixel fire is counted. It is useful for understanding how much activity is enriched, but a long-lived tab, scripted session, or crawler can move it sharply.

Resolved identifier count: distinct_profiles counts distinct resolved hashed-email identifiers (HEMs). One person can have multiple HEMs, so this is not a guaranteed unique-person count and has no anonymous-person denominator.

Neither the event rate nor the cookie rate is guaranteed to be higher. Their relationship depends on how much activity resolved and unresolved cookies generate.

What Affects Your Rate

Things that can raise it

• More US desktop traffic: Chrome and Edge visitors resolve at the highest rates
• Returning visitors: People who've been seen before are more likely to match
• B2B sites: Business visitors on managed devices with persistent cookies resolve better than consumer traffic

Things that can lower it

• High mobile/iOS share: If 60%+ of your traffic is iPhone, your headline rate will be lower
• International audience: Non-US traffic is outside the addressable benchmark and usually resolves at a lower rate, although existing matched cookies can resolve
• Bot-heavy sites: News, content, and SEO-heavy sites attract more crawler traffic

Things that make it volatile

• Low event volume: A few visitors can move a daily percentage sharply. More traffic stabilizes the measurement; it does not make an individual visitor more resolvable.
• Bursty sessions: One long-lived tab, automation loop, or unclassified crawler can generate many events and dominate an event rate while the cookie rate stays comparatively stable.

How to Check Your Rate

In the Dashboard

Your project dashboard shows resolution statistics broken down by day. Capture time shows the original event-state view for the selected dates. Settled shows the published statistics snapshot for dates that have completed settlement. These labels describe data completeness; they do not promise that an unresolved event will be upgraded automatically.

For a mixed range, the dashboard defaults to settled dates and lets you switch to the full capture-time view. If the range has no settled dates yet, it shows capture-time values explicitly. Compare like with like: a capture-time range and a settled range do not have the same completeness.

Via the API

Call the Resolution Statistics endpoint. It returns the whole picture for your organization in one response: the all-traffic and addressable rates, the why-unresolved funnel, the per-browser split, the per-visitor (cookie) rate, and the first-time vs returning breakdown.

curl "https://api.delivr.ai/api/v1/resolution/statistics" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "X-Api-Secret: YOUR_API_SECRET"

Three fields in the response are worth understanding:

• Event rate (resolution_rate) counts pixel fires, so frequent visitors and scripted sessions carry more weight.
• Cookie rate (visitors.cookie_rate) counts distinct browser cookies. It reduces event-frequency weighting but is not a unique-person rate.
• Addressable rate (addressable.rate) uses the directly measured addressable.events and addressable.resolved_events pair. If the pair is missing, incomplete, or violates subset invariants, addressable.available is false and the three values are null instead of being estimated.

The first_touch section compares first-time and returning browser cookies. Returning cookies often resolve at a higher rate, but use the measured split for your own traffic rather than assuming a fixed relationship.

See the Resolution Statistics reference for the full response schema.

What Matters More Than the Rate

The resolution rate tells you how much of your traffic is identified. But for sales and marketing, what matters is:

1. Are you getting enough leads? A 5% rate on a site with 50,000 monthly visitors means ~2,500 resolved events per month -- potentially hundreds of unique contacts.

2. Are they the right people? Resolved visitors come with full enrichment: name, email, company, job title, seniority, industry, and more. One identified VP of Sales on your pricing page is worth more than 100 anonymous page views.

3. Is the data actionable? Each resolved event includes the page visited, time, and full contact details -- ready for CRM import or outbound campaigns.

Next Steps

• On-Domain Events API -- Query your resolved events
• High-Intent Visitors -- Build a daily lead list from high-value page visitors
• Export Events to CSV -- Export resolved visitor data for your CRM