Google has delayed the total phase out of third-party cookies until early 2025, giving the industry more time to find alternative privacy-safe ID solutions. There are already numerous options available that use a range of different methods from hashed emails, which are addresses that have been encrypted, to device IDs, data clean rooms and probabilistic IDs that use cross-channel signals and anonymous data points to build user profiles.
Confusing, right? That’s why IAB Tech Lab has created and recently released its ID Solutions Guidance to help advertisers, agencies and publishers find the ID solutions that work for them. It explains the different technologies and how they’re used, provides a glossary of terms and sets out ways for users to evaluate an ID solution and determine its success.
The guide details areas to look at during the evaluation process including scale and adoption, meaning that to ensure a publisher has adopted a specific ID solution or not determines whether the solution has sufficient scale in the channels and markets an advertiser operates in.
Quality of an ID solution is assessed on its characteristics as well as the capabilities of the tech provider such as how long is the lifetime of the user ID in addition to precision, a measurement of how many user IDs are given to the same ID, either a browser-based ID or people-based ID.
Interoperability is an important aspect to consider when evaluating an ID solution. This covers whether the ID solution has been adopted by key strategic partners and if the vendor can decode the IDs and communicate user identify through the digital ad supply chain
Privacy is one of the fundamentals for an ID solution. It’s important to assess whether the solution provider’s approach to privacy will ensure compliance with privacy requirements and regulations as well as the advertiser’s policies, while also enabling transparency and control for the user.
Some of the criteria for determining the success of an ID solution for advertisers, aside from ROAS and ROI, are measuring increase counts for addressable audience, incremental reach realized with the ID solution, deduplicated reach across devices and browsers, campaign costs and cost per unique user. Other areas to look at are measurement reporting and analytics, incremental conversions, and the impact on ROAS and other KPIs.
For publishers, aside from increase in overall revenue and CPM, evaluation should also include yield improvement such as average bid CPM, percentage of bid response rate and new demand partners added due to ID solution integration. Other issues for publishers to consider are impact on site load and user experience.
