The company: Real-time, interactive livestreaming across the globe

One of the world's highest-traffic livestreaming platforms serves millions of users globally, connecting creators and audiences through real-time streaming, chat, and interactive experiences.

The experience is inherently dynamic: What’s live now may be gone in minutes. That makes relevance in the first few seconds critical. For returning users, personalization isn’t just a nice-to-have. It determines whether they stay, engage, or leave.

As a platform that serves 500M+ monthly unique visitors, the majority of whom are repeat visitors, even small improvements in relevance can translate into significant business impact.

The challenge: No user continuity, no meaningful personalization

Their returning visitors made up the majority of traffic but were treated like new users every time.

The platform had already invested heavily in its recommendation engine, which performed well for logged-in users. But for returning visitors, the system lacked the most important input: identity.

Cookies and local storage proved unreliable. They were frequently cleared, blocked by browsers, or unavailable in incognito sessions. As a result, visitors who had previously engaged with the platform were treated as entirely new visitors every time they returned.

That meant no continuity across sessions, no accumulated behavioral data, and no meaningful personalization. Returning users were consistently served generic experiences, leading to lower engagement, shorter sessions, and missed conversion opportunities.

“We were leaving a measurable amount of revenue on the table simply because we couldn’t recognize returning visitors,” shared Brian Mulford, the platform’s chief product officer.

As personalization improved for logged-in users, the gap became impossible to ignore. The majority of the platform’s audience — its largest growth lever — remained effectively unoptimized.

The solution: Persistent visitor recognition at scale

To unlock personalization across returning visitor traffic, the platform turned to Fingerprint’s device intelligence solution to reliably recognize returning visitors across sessions without relying on cookies or collecting personal information.

Fingerprint generates a stable Visitor ID on page load that remains stable across cookie clearing, browser resets, and incognito sessions. Once recognized, that Visitor ID becomes the key for all downstream systems, allowing the platform to: 

• Accumulate user preferences across sessions
• Feed real signals into its recommendation engine
• Deliver personalized experiences to returning users in real time

Instead of starting from zero on every visit, returning users could now be treated much more like logged-in visitors, including receiving recommendations based on past behavior, preferences, and patterns.

The impact: Turning returning traffic into a revenue driver

With persistent identity in place, the platform was able to activate personalization across its largest audience segment — and the results were immediate:

• Fingerprint-powered recommendations drove a 6–8% lift in conversion rates among returning users, consistently across markets.
• With Fingerprint, the platform now recognizes more than 90% of visitors as returning users, while reducing no-match rates by 74%. 
• At the platform’s scale, those improvements translate into millions of dollars in incremental revenue.

More importantly, the economics of returning traffic fundamentally changed. What was once an unrecognized audience became a measurable, optimizable growth lever.

“This isn’t a marginal improvement; it’s a structural uplift in the economics of our returning audience,” Mulford said.

Why it matters: Identity as infrastructure

For this platform, persistent visitor identity is foundational infrastructure.

By extending identity to returning users, the team unlocked:

• Personalization at full audience scale
• More effective experimentation and optimization
• A seamless path from repeat browsing to account creation

Want to see what kind of impact this could have on your conversion rates? Talk to our team.