These 5 Alternate ID Solutions Lead the Pack

From the moment Google announced its intention in January 2020 to deprecate third-party cookies, the digital advertising industry has found itself consumed by a single, deceptively complex question: What will replace them? Experts agree the answer lies in a portfolio approach: a curated mix of alternative identifiers that, collectively, offer a comparable, privacy-compliant means of targeting and measurement. But this strategy has led to heightened competition among the 60-plus alternative IDs looking to make the cut. “We are never going to recommend just one solution,” said Sarah Polli, senior director of marketing technology at Hearts and Science. “We recommend a mixture, because we need as many signals in the bid stream as possible.” Despite these challenges, five alternative IDs have pulled away from the pack, according to interviews with a dozen digital advertising experts, as well as exclusive data from the currency platform Sincera and supply-side platform Sovrn. When accounting for their total adoption, financial performance and privacy durability, RampID and UID2.0 lead among deterministic candidates, ID5 and Panorama set the pace for probabilistic options and SharedID leads as a single-domain tracker. The emergence of a cadre of leading solutions aligns with broader data from Sovrn, which finds that the industry has begun to coalesce around a handful of IDs, according to Peter Cunha, its managing director of ad management. Of the 25,000 domains Sovrn monitors, the number of publishers deploying three or more solutions has decreased in the last six months, down to 19%, according to its bid-stream data. Likewise, 49% of publishers now deploy only one ID and 32% deploy two. However, this comes as the percentage of bid requests with an alternative ID present has risen, to 67% in the U.S. and 64% in the U.K., meaning publishers are using a smaller number of solutions but in greater volume. How publishers assess alternative IDs To solve for the universal addressability once offered by third-party cookies, publishers and marketers must employ a mix of deterministic and probabilistic solutions. Deterministic IDs require users to authenticate themselves, often with an email address, which enables marketers to serve them targeted ads but bottlenecks their total reach. Probabilistic IDs do not require authentication, giving them broader scale but at the expense of precision. Combined, the two tiers provide publishers a way to serve as relevant an ad as possible in every given environment, while ensuring people have consented to the exchange. But while they divide broadly into neat categories, the individual solutions can differ radically. As such, marketers must evaluate IDs based on additional criteria, such as their performance, level of adoption and business model. These factors can be difficult to measure. Performance, for example, which measures match rates and revenue lift among other factors, is hard to calculate due to the methods publishers use for testing, according to Justin Wohl, the chief revenue officer of Salon. To isolate the incremental value of an ID, publishers must split their version-testing by users, not traffic, assigning certain cohorts to ping only against certain solutions. Even then, demand for specific IDs varies, so a solution popular one month could appear abandoned the next. Momentum for Testing Cookie Alternatives Stalls on the Buy Side Deterministic: limited but lucrative potential Among deterministic offerings, RampID from LiveRamp has become the most widely adopted solution in the identity space. In March, it topped 46,000 deployments, according to data from Sincera, which crawls 270,000 domains and monitors bid-stream data to chronicle ID adoption, said co-founder Mike O’Sullivan. Each deployment represents a publisher that has installed the identifier, although capturing such data precisely can be challenging. RampID, which serves as the currency for an infrastructure called Authenticated Traffic Solutions (ATS), benefited from a first-mover advantage, having launched in 2017. It also bakes its costs into the buy-side, encouraging publisher adoption. “LiveRamp is most transacted on by advertisers,” said Patrick McCann, svp of research at CafeMedia. "It is the glue that holds the addressability space together.” When CafeMedia authenticates traffic through ATS, it sees a 300% to 500% CPM lift for Safari users, and a 20% to 30% CPM increase on Chrome, according to McCann. The second-most popular deterministic solution, UID2.0, topped 36,000 deployments in March. It owes its rapid adoption, in part, to the ubiquity of its cookie-dependent predecessor, UID, as well as a key integration with RampID, according to Wohl. “The Trade Desk leapfrogged their way into the market by connecting and syncing with the RampID,” Wohl said. “That gave them an immediate response to questions about who was using their ID.” The open-source software, which was developed by The Trade Desk and is now operated by Prebid, is free to use for all parties. SharedID, also from Prebid, serves a much different use case. It does not link an identifier to an individual, which means it is not technically a universal ID and offers limited commercial value. But the solution, which has notched 58,000 deployments, enables marketers to frequency cap in cookieless environments, boosting publisher CPMs by limiting the pool of biddable impressions and improving clickthrough rates. When CafeMedia set SharedID as its publisher-provided ID in Google Ad Manager, it saw an 8% lift on AdX buying in Safari, a roughly 1% lift in total revenue, according to McCann. Probabilistic: imprecise scale As publishers have experimented with the probabilistic solutions, two IDs have emerged from the pack. The first, ID5, benefits from its early entrance into the field, as it was introduced in 2017. In March, it reached 80,000 deployments, making ID5 the most widely adopted identifier on the open web. However, it generates little commercial return for its adoptees, according to Wohl, and instead serves as a free insurance policy against the shifting privacy landscape. According to Sovrn, when ID5 is present in a bid request, it generates an average lift in yield of 14%. Likewise, Panorama serves primarily as a hedge against future uncertainty. It has accrued more than 58,000 deployments, thanks in part to its connection to Lotame, a popular customer data platform. When the Panorama ID is present in a bid request, it yields on average a 15% lift in CPMs, according to Sovrn. These two solutions, like their deterministic counterparts, lead in their respective arenas, but all face constant threat. Alternate IDs themselves represent just one of several potential solves for the loss of third-party cookies, alongside browser-based, cohort-based and contextual approaches. “Universal IDs have their own limitations,” said Todd Rose, the senior vice president of addressability at InMobi. “So even they have to be wrapped into a larger portfolio of approaches.” This story is part of Adweek’s Finding the Customer digital package, which spotlights marketers’ efforts to accurately measure and track evolving consumer behaviors and engagement.

Finding the Customer

As Alternate ID Adoption Increases, These 5 Solutions Lead the Pack

The notoriously saturated ecosystem has finally begun to consolidate

Mark Stenberg

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Mark Stenberg