Privacy changes including regulations and persistent viewership fragmentation, are making it more challenging to target the right audiences and measure the impact of advertising spend.
Several identity and audience targeting solutions have emerged to fill the gaps. Universal IDs play a significant role in identity resolution by serving as a consistent and privacy-centric way to identify and link user data across various contexts. Individual publishers have their own first-party IDs. And, beyond audience IDs, contextual targeting has been enjoying increased relevance as a means of making advertising more relevant to viewers based on the content they’re consuming.
All of these ID solutions and audience targeting techniques are helping publishers navigate identity and develop an audience targeting strategy to better serve advertisers, which is critical to maximizing revenue.
However, while it’s great that publishers now have many options to help advertisers enhance the relevance of their advertising, the proliferation of IDs and audience targeting methods presents its own challenges. How do publishers stitch together these many IDs and targeting tactics to make advertising easy and effective for media buyers?
Answering that question starts with understanding the solutions available and how they work together.
The Leading Identity Approaches Driving the Market Today
Publishers now have multiple solutions at their disposal for identity resolution, or the process of linking multiple identifiers across various devices to create a uniform view of a specific user. Here are three solutions available to publishers, including what they do—and don’t—offer.
Universal IDs
Universal IDs are identifiers for individual users, typically based on email addresses, that are shared and identified across the full supply chain. One notable example is LiveRamp’s RampID.
Universal IDs are helpful from buy-side to sell-side, as they tend to show higher match rates for advertisers and can offer increased programmatic revenue for publishers. Their capabilities are slightly limited, however, as they privilege the buy-side, allowing advertisers to shop around for publishers who employ their universal ID of choice.
First-party IDs
First-party IDs are identifiers that are proprietary to the publisher who owns the consumer relationship. First-party IDs tend to be more inherently secure due to the direct control publishers have over data collection, storage, and usage, along with firsthand consumer consent and enhanced transparency. These factors collectively reduce the risk of data leaks and empower consumers to manage their own information more effectively. First-party IDs are an accurate and deterministic means of identity resolution. However, because they are first-party, they are limited in scale to the publisher’s own channels.
Contextual targeting
Contextual targeting works by identifying relevant content for a particular user in which to place an ad. This method doesn’t rely on audience data, but rather it allows advertisers to select the most relevant place for the ad to reach its target audience.
However, contextual targeting can be a costly solution as it relies on content categorization. It is also limited to the demand publishers can generate.
What Steps Can Publishers Take to Solve Identity?
No matter which solution, or which combination of solutions, you deem best for your business, the identity puzzle requires a strategic and multi-pronged approach. Follow these steps to ensure you put the right foot forward.
Partner
Publishers can set themselves apart by meeting the identity, audience, and contextual needs of their advertisers. One great approach to this is to partner with strategic identity and audience targeting providers. Part of that will be partnering with universal ID providers, part of it will be activating your own first-party data, and part of it will be leveraging contextual targeting solutions. All of it will be reinforced by identity spine providers who complete the puzzle.
Invest
While third-party data has value, publishers should invest in their own first-party data solutions to enhance audience targeting on their own terms. They can help contribute to the larger success of the industry and overall experience, too, by sharing data with other publishers and identity providers, who, combined, can help to offset some of the impacts affecting the quality of cross-publisher signals.
Deploy
Lastly, businesses need to ensure they are doing all they can to protect themselves from data leaks so they can maintain expectations of privacy with both clients and consumers. By collecting relevant consumer data responsibly and working with partners who can help them consensually see more of each audience member’s activity, publishers can encourage greater buy-side demand — because logged-in users are more enticing to advertisers.
Looking Ahead: Determining the Best Approach for Your Business
There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to identity, and publishers need a multi-faceted approach to identity resolution. For example, while universal IDs are intended to be identifiable across the supply chain, no one universal ID has full coverage across all channels. Publishers need to stitch together a tapestry of solutions by forging partnerships, making investments in first-party data, and enhancing contextual targeting capabilities.
To learn more about first-party data and how publishers can assess the maturity of their identity strategies, download the latest FreeWheel Advisory Services report: Expanding the Addressable Universe: Publisher First-Party Data.
