By Kayleigh Barber • January 22, 2024 • 5 min read •
If you asked publishers to replace third-party cookies with alternative identifiers last summer, most would have responded with a fatigued shrug. But now some are able to quantify the cookie replacements’ revenue impact.
In a test of Unified ID 2.0 — which was developed by The Trade Desk, had been managed by Prebid and is now operated by TTD — Justin Wohl, CRO of Salon, Snopes and TV Tropes, recorded a 200% increase in CPMs compared to ads served to an authenticated audience with third-party cookies present. The testing started in early Q4 2023 and specifically focused on TVTropes.org’s logged-in user base, which represents about 5% of the site’s 150 million pageviews per month. The cookieless test group was confined to Apple’s Safari browser, which enabled the publisher to evaluate the alternative ID’s revenue impact in an environment isolated from third-party cookies.
After confirming those results with The Trade Desk, Wohl said his team “pretty much locked in our commitment to go all-in on UID 2.0.”
For Unwind Media, which owns online gaming sites Solitaired and Solitaire Bliss, first-party deterministic IDs — specifically LiveRamp’s RampID, UID 2.0, Yahoo’s ConnectedID and ID5 — have been the focus for alternative ID experimentation, according to Emry DowningHall, the company’s svp of programmatic revenue and strategy.
“We found that when a deterministic ID is present in the bidstream … we see between a 40% and 50% CPM increase vs. non-logged in users,” DowningHall said. The tests did not isolate a cookieless cohort to test in a controlled third-party cookie-free browser. “Does that become even more valuable down the road when the third-party cookie deprecates? My guess is that it does,” which is why his team is prioritizing strategies to get more users to self-authenticate on-site this year.
When asked if there was a specific identifier out of the four named above that DowningHall suspected was driving that increase, he said that his team didn’t look specifically at which ID was present, just if there was one present at all in the initial tests.
“It’s the culmination of the IDs that we run that provide that benefit. There isn’t an ID that we’re looking to expand and add, but I also don’t feel the need to narrow it down,” DowningHall said, adding that having four main ID partners hasn’t resulted in page load speed issues or other concerns that would drive him to want to consolidate ID partners beyond the point his team is at now.
Other publishers said they are still in the process of narrowing down the alternative IDs they want to test, but they haven’t gotten to the place where they can share a measurable revenue lift.
Jo Holdaway, chief marketing and data officer of The Independent, said that there are a few main ID solutions that her team is keeping an eye on.