Evolving publisher identity strategies for the modern web

Identity and privacy are hot topics for publishers, but the noise is not easily parsed for signal. Increased regulation and platforms’ evolution away from cross-site and cross-app tracking have launched a wave of innovation to support a new, more privacy-enhancing advertising paradigm. It’s not easy for publishers to know what will work, or what to focus on.

There are many ID solutions available, and emerging ways of activating a publisher’s first-party data. With Google’s announcement, a degree of uncertainty around the future of third-party cookies remains. Third-party cookies will not be entirely deprecated on Chrome at the browser level, but the browser will instead introduce a new experience that lets users make a choice. While further clarification on this new experience hasn’t been provided yet, what is clear is that ad tech reliance on third-party cookies will diminish and that publishers are faced with a laundry list of concerns, questions, and solutions to navigate. However, publishers don’t have to tackle all of this alone – Microsoft Advertising is here to help chart the course to addressability.

Navigating significant change with limited information

The internet is changing. The increased interest in privacy and the resultant signal loss for advertisers is on everyone’s mind. As a publisher, you have huge strategic decisions to make, and a lot of technical complexity to understand, and the interests of your users and partners to consider. Adapting to all this change will require careful attention, experimentation, and commitment in the face of uncertainty.

What’s at stake? According to Google’s study from 2019, removing third-party cookies used for cross-site tracking decreased publisher revenue by an average of 52%. While Google has published relatively good results using Privacy Sandbox, other marketplace participants are not seeing the performance. Publishers should be aware of how their different partners can be impacted. The most recent study released by Google’s sell-side on July 22 showed Privacy Sandbox tech limiting the loss to ~20%, but this still represents a meaningful gap for publishers. This result should be considered alongside Index Exchange’s study, which found that Sandbox APIs only increased CPMs marginally compared to signal loss with no mitigation. Similarly, Criteo’s recent experiments with the Chrome Privacy Sandbox showed revenue loss estimated closer to 60% for “fully implemented” publishers. It’s possible that Criteo’s finding that Google’s share of monetization jumped up to 83% simply reflects that Google is furthest along with the Privacy Sandbox tech for bidding, where other bidders have invested less heavily. This perspective is supported by Google’s recent study on buy-side effectiveness, where they found 86% ‘performance recovery’ on scale preservation and 95% conversions-per-dollar ‘performance recovery’ using the Sandbox APIs. An additional concern is the significant increase in latency observed by both Criteo and Index Exchange, which represents yet another concerning aspect of the Privacy Sandbox for publishers. Even if the Privacy Sandbox preserved revenue, will your users wait that much longer for the ads to load?

These important caveats aside, the clear implication of these data points is that business as usual is going to be fundamentally disrupted.

There is no clean translation from old to new

Publishers and advertisers will fundamentally have to build their businesses differently, and many of the building blocks for a new way of doing business either don’t exist, or aren’t used today at scale. The point of the evolving landscape is to make it impossible to do some of the things that marketplace participants have historically used third-party cookies to do; there is not going to be something that works the same way.

That said, your audience and your inventory are still valuable. And to the extent that you have first-party data you can use to package inventory, that will be even more valuable. There continue to be new tools and practices to facilitate transactions, and we can help you learn what works best for you and your business. The most important thing you can do at this point is to make sure you are strategizing across multiple mitigation approaches, with an eye to experimentation and iteration.

Your task is not trivial. You need to comply with privacy regulations, serve your customers' evolving preferences, adapt to rapidly changing industry practices, and make money.

It’s a hard needle to thread and considering the marketplace ignition problems there is unlikely to be a single dominant strategy. Therefore, experimentation and adaptability are key. Where historically it could be expected that marketplaces and tools are relatively comparable, increasingly publishers will have to lean in on technical details to differentiate. Make sure to set aside time to really understand the capabilities and implementation details of your partner platforms.

Evolving with Microsoft Advertising

At Microsoft Advertising, our Microsoft Monetize platform, powered by Xandr, offers a variety of tools to publishers, including:

• Publisher Provided IDs (PPIDs) for activating your first-party data
• Universal IDs for providing scale and interoperability
• Identity management and reporting control and security across different ID types, and performance monitoring to know what works best
• Browser technology like Privacy Sandbox and Ad Selection, for privacy preserving targeting and reporting
• Microsoft Curate for enabling partners to layer in additional data and merchandising to bring differentiated demand to your inventory
• Microsoft data bringing you differentiated demand targeting our proprietary data

Adopting identifiers

You should be thinking about activating your first-party data by creating and leveraging Publisher Provided IDs (PPIDs) in your ad platforms. A PPID is a publisher-owned identifier typically representing authenticated user IDs or first-party cookies that can be used to create first party segment targeting in deals or for managed buying. As such, PPIDs are an important part of a publisher’s strategy to increase programmatic demand and mitigate the risk of revenue loss as we see a reduction in the availability of third-party cookies. It’s important to create your own audiences, but also to make sure that your platforms have sufficient controls and security for managing your business the right way. Make sure that when you’re using PPIDs to facilitate advertising that you can activate them while remaining confident about which partners have access to the identifiers, and the security of the platforms you’re using.

Taking advantage of universal IDs – such as LiveRamp’s Ramp ID, or UID2.0 from Prebid – provides scale that your authenticated user strategy may not. Leveraging these IDs in Microsoft Monetize is as simple as passing them on a request, once a publisher has an integration with a given ID solution. There are so many universal IDs in the market, and there will be more, so experimentation and adaptation are critical. You need to be able to adjust as solutions or buyer preferences evolve over time. This is where Microsoft Monetize features like Identity Manager and ID-based reporting solutions are needed, so that you can control access to these identifiers and see what impact they have on monetization.

ID management and insights

As mentioned above, the availability of identifiers is one thing, but you need confidence in the control, security, and insights provided by the platform you’re using. Microsoft Monetize offers Identity Management to allow publishers to finely control use and visibility of identifiers right from the Monetize UI. You can have confidence in how your PPIDs are being used, and even where universal IDs that you have access to are flowing. If you want to allow another member to upload segments using your PPID, but not to see those ids in their log level data, you can do that. Control and security allows you to build your business the way you want.

Microsoft Monetize offers reporting tools that provide clarity on what identifiers — or combinations of identifiers — are driving performance. As you test and iterate, you’ll have confidence in the data that informs your evolving strategy.

Browser technology

Browsers themselves are innovating in addressability technology. With new capabilities like the Privacy Sandbox in Google Chrome and Ad Selection in Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Advertising is supporting and driving this innovation. Our support for Chrome’s Protected Audience API is currently in alpha and we plan to support Edge’s Ad Selection API in the new year. Publishers can have the confidence that Microsoft Monetize will support these emerging technologies and drive the best possible monetization in the evolving environment. We are working alongside the industry and the web browser community to further innovate in this space to develop solutions that better balance user privacy and ad effectiveness.

Microsoft Curate

Microsoft Curate is a preferred sales channel for companies offering contextual or semantic solutions, who can help to increase bid density on publishers' non-addressable inventory in the open market. Curators with addressable audiences help deal with identity fragmentation because they can leverage Microsoft data in Microsoft Curate to maintain reach on their addressable audiences. Publishers using Microsoft Monetize don't have to do anything to benefit from that as those curators bring demand from DSPs, with a 33% average increase in spend for publishers who participate in curation.

Additionally, publishers themselves can become curators and use Microsoft Curate to merchandise their proprietary data to capture new programmatic spend.

Microsoft data

Publishers using Microsoft Monetize will benefit from demand that leverages proprietary Microsoft data. Advertisers using Microsoft Advertising's platform benefit from our ability to help them reach their users across devices, individual identity spaces, and supply. For sellers, this means that demand can more effectively reach supply across all publishers on Microsoft Monetize and be maintained as the prevalence of third-party cookies decreases. This benefit can be augmented by sharing publisher first party IDs (PPIDs), typically in the form of an authenticated or first party cookie ID, to ensure addressability on your supply without reliance on third-party cookie information.

Get in touch today

As the industry is constantly evolving, it is essential to work with partners who are able to not only integrate with the most scalable solutions, but also influence the industry to adopt better privacy-preserving advertising solutions. At Microsoft Advertising, we are uniquely positioned to help you navigate this changing identity landscape by enabling you to retain and drive the value of your audience.