Cookieless Identity Solutions For Publishers

Cookieless Identity Solutions

Another wave of cookieless identity solutions is taking hold in the advertising technology industry in the wake of third-party cookie deprecation. In the near future, third-party cookies will be a thing of the past, thanks to Google’s proposal to prohibit them.

Google is determined to discontinue support for third-party cookies by the end of 2023 in the face of rising privacy concerns and regulatory scrutiny. Third-party cookies reduced revenue by 52 percent on average for top 500 worldwide publishers, with a 64 percent reduction on average for each publisher, according to a Google poll.

Publishers and marketers are looking to identify solutions to aid in building trust with their audiences. Data privacy (59 percent) is the most common motivation for publishers and marketers to implement new identification solutions (52%). In this article, we are going to discuss cookieless identity solutions. With no further ado, let’s get started!

Cookieless Identity Solutions

So, what’s the best course of action for brands looking to have a deeper understanding of what all of this includes, prioritize, and adopt an identity resolution strategy? And how should marketers make sense of all of these complicated activities that are having such a significant impact on the way they advertise?

The fact that many technologies are offering their own cookieless tracking solutions on the issue makes it much more difficult for brands to navigate this tricky subject area. How can you know which partner is appropriate for your marketing needs, especially since each has its own set of core skills and competitive advantages? Well, let’s discuss some cookieless identity solutions.

Trade Desk

One of those techniques is the latest version of The Trade Desk’s ID solution, Unified ID 2.0. It replaces third-party cookies with anonymized email addresses as an identification. Salon, Newsweek, Magnite, Index Exchange, and SpotX are among the solution’s contributors.

Prebid.org runs UID 2.0 and ensures that it stays open source, according to AdExchanger. Prebid controls Prebid Server, an open-source server-to-server header bidding technology, as well as Prebid.js, one of the most prominent open-source header bidding wrappers. Prebid will be responsible for email encryption and decryption, as well as the UID 2.0 hardware and software infrastructure.

ID5

Another is ID5, a French firm that offers, a self-contained ID solution called ID5 ID.

  1. ID5 leverages both hard and soft signals (including hashed email addresses, page URL, IP address, user agent etc.) and uses deterministic and probabilistic methods to link IDs across domains and devices. By doing so, ID5 can significantly increase the size of the addressable audience, even for those websites that have a small percentage of logged-in users.
  2. They only identify a user once they have consent, but they also go one step further with their advanced encryption mechanisms that block unauthorised vendors from activating the ID and enforce users’ preferences down the value chain.

LiveRamp

LiveRamp’s pseudonymous identifier, RampID, is another example. RampID incorporates LiveRamp’s identity resolution capabilities, which allow for the privacy-compliant resolution of various consumer identities across thousands of enterprises, publishers, technology platforms, data owners and agencies, safely and securely.

It doesn’t matter if the data is offline or online, if it’s first-party CRM or third-party behavioral, if it’s internet exposure data or mobile app download data—these disparate identities can all be resolved to the  person or household  level, then used to enrich data sets and market better.

So, what else should companies know about cookieless solutions?

Since last year, the great cookie problem has been the subject of considerable discussion, debate, and speculation in the advertising technology community. As third-party cookies and mobile IDs (MAIDS) are phased out of the equation, the digital advertising landscape is shifting.

For sure, there isn’t a single technique that can replicate the cookie or MAID. Technology will play a critical role in attribution, media buying, and measurement in this new environment.

Third-party cookies will no longer be supported by Apple and Google as a result of their commitment to consumer privacy. As previously indicated, the cookie disposal has resulted in an influx of new identity solutions, the majority of which are based on email addresses. Everything about this is ironic in the extreme. 

Third-party cookies are completely devoid of any user-identifiable information (PII) and may be controlled by the user through their browser settings, but the proposed workaround relies on an anonymous hashed email sent from a user’s computer without their awareness.

Are they powerful?

Identity resolution enhances both media buying and cross-channel attribution since it provides more accurate data. With the proper partner, you’ll have even more success in your search for a single customer perspective. Every step of the media strategy, from prospecting and retargeting to personalization, data, and measurement, is affected by a company’s sense of identity.

There has been significant progress made in activating these IDs across the buying platforms by the demand side of the programmatic exchange process, which has been working to develop proprietary solutions for cookieless tracking.

While third-party cookies are becoming less common, it’s important to remember that there will never be a totally “cookie-free world.” Only third-party cookies will be erased by all major browsers, while first-party cookies will remain an important part of publisher data collecting.

When a client visits a website, publishers use first-party cookies to provide a more tailored experience. First-party cookies, for example, allow a user’s shopping cart to remain full when they leave and return to a website. Customers, on the other hand, engage indirectly with third-party cookies because the domain and these third-party cookie providers have a relationship.

Impact on Publishers

Despite claims from the digital advertising ecosystem, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. Different approaches will need to be well understood, tested, and put into action in order to maintain the same levels of ad effectiveness. Publishers will need to keep on top of industry trends and put them to the test since if they don’t, they risk losing audience relationships as well as sophisticated targeting opportunities such as:

  1. Publishers won’t be allowed to employ frequency limits on their ads, which means customers would see the same ads over and over again, potentially aggravating them. They won’t be able to create an audience list to target with targeted ads.
  2. For both digital advertising and affiliate marketing, publishers will fail to target and retarget audiences throughout the Internet.
  3. Publishers will have a difficult time determining ad effectiveness, particularly in terms of cross-device conversions and view-through rate.

The impact of eliminating third-party cookies will be felt across the whole advertising industry, as they have been used for a variety of purposes for the past two decades, including retargeting, conversion tracking, and so on. This has also benefited publishers in identifying their users so that the user experience can be improved.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is cookieless id?

The term “cookieless” refers to a style of marketing in which advertisers use fewer third-party cookies, which are small bits of data shared between advertisers that contain personal identifiers when consumers browse the web. This has a significant impact on websites that use third-party cookies to identify users and serve them relevant advertising and marketing.

Cookies, in general, save information about your computer in order to identify you as a unique visitor by storing identifiers such as registration numbers or session IDs. Other identifiers (such as your IP address) will uniquely identify your computer if cookies are removed, allowing others to learn more about who you are online.

What is cookieless targeting?

Advertisements in cookieless advertising are targeted based on the context in which they appear. It targets ad placements using algorithms that take into account keywords, page content, and other metadata. Users are served to advertise based on the content they are now reading. Modern cookieless targeting takes advantage of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), making it more effective than before.

Which method of identification is the most effective?

There isn’t an easy answer to this question. All of the ID options are still in the works, with some already in use. For publishers, the final decision may come down to whatever ID solution allows them to trade seamlessly with their existing programmatic demand partners.

How do you prepare for the cookieless world?

Although “a world without cookies” may appear frightening to marketers and businesses used to third-party cookies, there is some consolation in the fact that only third-party cookies are being phased out. First-party cookies will continue to exist, and relevant advertising, audience segmentation, and personalization will still be possible.

Top marketing teams will have three main alternatives for ensuring addressability if third-party cookies are disabled: fingerprinting or probabilistic advertising, cohort-based advertising, and Universal ID or authentication.

Why do you need a universal id?

Consumers will not see irrelevant advertising that does not appeal to them, and publishers and advertisers will be able to show the correct ads in the proper context. SSPs are not required to pay for data synchronization and storage on another network. DSPs can bid more frequently in the auction and help advertisers meet their campaign objectives. Between the SSPs and DSPs, data suppliers receive greater match rates.

What is a universal id?

By combining first-party and offline data to generate a user identification, universal ID, or shared ID, solutions try to map 1:1 what was previously done with cookies (user ID). The Universal ID was developed by ad tech businesses and consortiums (IAB, Advertising ID Consortium) to identify users without the need to sync cookies.

Unlike cookies, which use probabilistic matching, most Universal IDs use deterministic matching. A Universal ID can be created by combining first-party data (CRM) with offline data. The usage of universal IDs allows publishers and marketers to avoid data loss and user duplication that occurs when cookie information is synced across several platforms.

What are Universal ID’s drawbacks?

There are certain drawbacks to using a unified ID system. To begin, ad tech businesses and consortiums provide a variety of ID solutions, but their efficacy varies. Second, because many Universal IDs rely on both first-party and third-party cookies, they are vulnerable to Chrome’s inevitable phase-out of third-party cookies.

What is the definition of first-party data?

First-party data refers to information acquired by the domain the user is now visiting. This includes any data obtained directly from a publisher’s own audience. First-party data has never been more valuable than it is now, according to recent business advancements. Publishers who have spent time and effort collecting, categorizing, and packaging their first-party data might gain from sharing it with purchasers and charging a premium for their inventory. To make their technology work, some newer ID systems rely on first-party storage mechanisms as well.

Why do publishers need to make the switch now and be prepared for 2023 cookies’ death?

All of the ways we track, target, and measure digital advertising performance rely on cookies. Users are secretly tracked through cookies. We didn’t do a good job as an industry in terms of informing people about how and why cookies are used. We also failed to provide an opt-out option.

You have no control over who collects this data or where it goes as a consumer. You can remove cookies from your own browser, but you’ll never be able to modify or delete servers containing third-party data that has already been obtained.

In reaction to consumer perceptions of lack of transparency and control, data breaches, and “creepiness” in advertising, the future may be cookieless, and publishers will need to move to cookieless solutions.

Final Words

Different innovations and imaginative approaches to cope with the cookie-less issue are foreseen in the near future, and new cookieless identity solutions are already being developed. It will be necessary to find the right balance between preserving privacy and security while still providing a personalized user experience in order to prepare for a cookie-free future.

It’s critical to review your current measurement setup and marketing budget and to recognize that third-party cookie alternatives will eat up a large chunk of your cash in the coming months. Cookie-less data, when handled correctly, will not only secure the advertising industry’s security but will also respect user privacy.