As ad tech undergoes radical transformations, publishers have no choice but to adopt proactive strategies to support their advertising business. This is especially crucial, considering that their revenue depends more on digital channels each year. Therefore, media companies must evaluate new solutions to comply with privacy changes and maintain revenue from ads. One powerful answer to the industry shifts is the adoption of ID Graph, a Swiss knife for data management and activation.
Unifying Your Audience View: The Power of ID Graph
An identity graph, or ID Graph, merges data from various touchpoints to create a comprehensive customer view. This centralized dataset includes interconnected data from different channels, providing valuable insights into the audience and helping publishers recognize or infer who is on their website. For broadcasters and audio platforms, this means understanding your viewers' and listeners' behaviors across devices and connecting those insights back to the broader audience strategy.
Types of Identifiers that are commonly used in a unified customer graph:
- Individual IDs
- Hashed Emails
- PII (name, email address, phone number)
- Customer IDs
- Cookies
- Audio ID
- MAIDs, GAIDs and IDFAs
- Universal IDs
- Household IDs
- IP addresses
- CTV IDs
- ZIP code
- Device IDs
A variety of data sources could be used to build and optimize an ID Graph. The most essential sources include first-party audience data from CRMs, data warehouses, and other cloud-based customer platforms, as well as usage data collected from their owned properties through SDKs, streaming data collection, and other methods. For audio platforms and TV networks, data from streaming platforms, set-top boxes, and listener/viewer interactions can significantly enhance the accuracy of custom ID graphs.
Incorporating authenticated personally identifiable information (PII) makes the graph more accurate. The most common approach is to obtain consenting browsing data such as IP addresses and first-party cookies. However, publishers often partner with other identity data providers due to the limitations of collecting first-party data. The company can opt to collaborate with partners that provide identity data, alternative IDs, or licensed data for audience enrichment.
Profit-Generating Use Cases That Optable’s Identity Solutions Unlock for Publishers
To demonstrate their value to ad partners, publishers must become experts in their audience data. An ID Graph helps publishers determine effective strategies and enhance their ad services. Let's delve into four illustrative use cases within Optable that can unleash effective data monetization strategies.
.png)
1. Unlock revenue by using ID Graph in activation of segmented audiences
Signals come from many places. Merging them simultaneously in real time is challenging for most datasets, but not for a purpose-built ID Graph. Graphs allow publishers to update and expand centralized data from multiple locations. This empowers ad sales and data teams to categorize specific user segments and differentiate their audience across all available sources for targeted advertising.
Insights from segmenting help publishers define unique audiences and communicate their value to advertising partners and make informed data strategy decisions, including planning and activation. Segmentation within a comprehensive ID Graph becomes a game-changer for audience activation. For audio platforms and TV networks, segmenting based on listening or viewing patterns can offer precise targeting opportunities, whether through direct ad placements or programmatic buys.
Publishers should seek interoperability within their ID Graph to make activation seamless and hassle-free. This allows to onboard specific customer clusters to ad platforms. For digital publishers, this means activating audiences directly on websites through SDKs or integrating with ad servers. Consider it as a secret recipe on how to reduce the tech stack and to make the life of your data teams a bit easier. In Optable’s highly interoperable environment, publishers can seamlesslyI activate custom audiences with all of the mentioned options, enhancing marketing campaigns and helping partners achieve their goals. Read our article on interoperability to revisit its importance.
2. Use ID Graphs to boost partnerships through data collaboration
Over the past few years, publishers started increasingly adopting data collaboration to work with their advertising partners in a privacy-protected way to build & activate data-driven campaigns. The key to effective data collaboration is the use of first-party data. Publishers who have invested in strong identity graphs for their first-party data will create efficiencies in segmenting and creating new audiences, grow their partnerships by sharing deep insights with advertising partners, and maximize their match rates and addressability.
Based on first-party data, data collaboration is a robust tool that drives highly accurate and high-performing advertising, generating profits for all involved parties. Optable as a data collaboration platform amplifies the collaboration capability with the custom-built ID Graphs, analyzing user data before and after matching. Publishers can explore this alternative to create new revenue streams amidst industry shifts.
3. Maximize the revenue from programmatic deals with ID Bridging
The process of stitching first-party identifiers and signals from other data partners into ID Graph is also referred to as ID Bridging. It helps publishers increase the value of their inventory for buyers on programmatic platforms by increasing the amount of IDs they can share with their demand partners for a specific visitor. Sending the enriched bid request with additional identifiers allows publishers to increase the addressability of their audience to the marketers. The outcome for sellers will be growth in bid density and an increase in programmatic yield.
When proposing this solution to publishers, Optable prioritizes transparency to ensure our customers have full visibility and the ability to choose which identifiers and data signals are used. Optable also recommends that publishers work with their demand partners to determine exactly how IDs can be used. ID Bridging can be an efficient data monetization strategy for media companies, bringing sustainable revenue growth from building durable audiences and selling valuable ad space to advertisers in the post-cookies era.
4. Test a new way of advertising through Privacy Sandbox
While Google decided to hand over cookie deprecation to the end users of Chrome, the Privacy Sandbox remains an efficient advertising solution, aligned with privacy regulations and we anticipate over time that this approach will gain usage not just within Google Chrome but also within other browsers. The Optable team offers publishers and advertisers a working solution to test the new technology for programmatic ads. ID Graph complements the new advertising framework by allowing publishers to onboard their audiences for targeting through the new capabilities of the Privacy Sandbox module.
ID graphs are emerging as a powerful data management tool that unlocks data activation and collaboration use cases, assisting publishers to grow their ad businesses in the industry that prioritizes user data protection. With centralized data and enrichment opportunities, publishers can increase revenue from programmatic ads and direct ad collaborations.
To learn more about Optable’s Identity Solution, ask for a demo.
.png)
