Consumer privacy is now a world issue, expediting the disappearance of third-party cookies and leaving advertisers scrambling for addressability solutions to reach their target audience. And as the emphasis shifts to the contact between publishers and consumers, publishers are looking to SSPs for help to make the most of their first-party data. In this post, we cover how the direct partnership with publishers allows for SSPs to help advertisers reach their target audiences in a privacy-compliant way while still achieving high performance on their programmatic ad campaigns.
Industry Shift
Third-party cookies are going away for good soon, which is forcing advertising companies to rethink technology and how they reach consumers. Demand for greater privacy for consumers has increased, with lawmakers creating regulations and privacy procedures for how sites and companies collect, store, and transfer user data.
Additionally, browsers that already rid third-party cookies, like Safari and Firefox, and Apple giving users the option to limit tracking between apps, are creating additional barriers for advertisers. CTV, too, by nature does not include cookies because consumers use apps to access content.
This shift in the industry is placing an emphasis on the first point of contact between publishers and consumers. Through their direct partnership with publishers, suppliers are a treasure trove of consented, first-party data, making them great partners for advertisers that want to thrive in a cookieless world.
6 Ways SSPs Help Advertisers Thrive In A Cookieless World
Whether it’s reaching target audiences in a privacy-compliant way or achieving high performance on ad campaigns, there are six main ways that SSPs can help advertisers counter the lack of addressability and precision that comes with the disappearance of third-party cookies and extended privacy controls:
- Seller Defined Audiences
- Cohorts
- Universal Identifiers
- Curated Inventory
- Ad Enhancements
- Contextual Targeting
Privacy-Complaint Audience Targeting
Creating audience segments will become very difficult for advertisers without cookies. A large portion of user tracking will be enabled directly by the users themselves by either accepting first-party cookies or through Universal Identifier (UID) solutions.
Advertisers will rely more on SSPs to pass back those UIDs and publisher-controlled first-party data as Seller-Defined Audiences (SDAs) or Cohorts to the DSP.
1. Seller Defined Audiences
SSPs sift through seemingly endless amounts of publisher first-party data like a fine toothed comb to create Seller-Defined Audiences (SDAs.) Using non-Personal Identifying Information (PII), SSPs create audience segments like “Sports Fans” or “First-time Homeowners” using demographics, purchase intent and interests.
Additionally, the IAB Tech Lab is working on standardizing Seller Defined Audiences, ensuring greater transparency and trust between publishers, SSPs, and advertisers.
2. Cohorts
Cohorts are also an option for targeting users without the need for third-party cookies. The idea of cohorts is to combine similar SDAs in real-time and place these users in aggregated groups across different publishers, all without the need of third-party cookies and cross-site tracking.
3. Universal Identifiers
Where users opted-out of first-party cookies, UID solutions, like The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0, are a privacy-centric replacement of third-party cookies. Instead of tracking users between sites and pages, publishers can instead prompt users to log-in with a UID. Users create a UID profile by providing their email address or another piece of PII, which generates an encrypted UID token for the publisher.
Then, publishers relay the UID token with an ad request from the SSP, which is sent to the advertiser, allowing them to match it with their audience data or use it for frequency capping. Users remain anonymous, and publishers, advertisers, and SSPs remain privacy-compliant.
Achieving High Performance
SSPs can help advertisers achieve high performance in a cookieless world by curating their inventory into custom packages built for performance, using contextual targeting to deliver relevant ads, while applying ad enhancements that improve the user experience for added performance gains.
4. Curated Inventory
SSPs curate through their inventory of publisher sites to create custom packages tailored to improving advertisers’ performance. Whether it’s achieving a certain KPI like a target CPA, bundling sites based on events, holidays, or themes, or a myriad of other options. SSPs can create custom packages for advertisers for any ad campaign.
For example, Sharethrough’s Gen Z Audience PMP is curated using a mix of cohort and contextual targeting to include sites relevant to Gen Z.
Furthermore, advertisers can scale the reach of their digital ad campaigns through omnichannel SSPs, allowing them to reach their target audiences across any device or format.
5. Ad Enhancements
Where targeting audiences isn’t accessible, advertisers are looking for alternatives to effectively reach their target audiences. While targeting and addressability methods are the primary focus, SSPs provide advertisers with additional tools to improve the connection between their ads and their target audiences simply by focusing on the ad creative. Sharethrough is leading the way SSPs develop ad enhancements for display, video, CTV and any other ad format.
Using Human-Centric Design (HCD), a method adopted by the top performing companies around the globe which places people’s behaviors and expectations at the core of the problem-solving process.
Ad enhancements like our Enhanced Banners product, which places the ad copy in the headline space where users are more likely to read the message, increasing advertisers’ CTR by 7x. For video ads, Dynamic Captions help improve consumers’ attention to their ads by adding human-verified captions in the headline space. For platforms like CTV, that were traditionally harder for users to act on, advertisers can use Dynamic CTV QR Codes – allowing viewers to to bridge the gap between smartphones and CTV, while also providing Scan Rates, a performance signal similar to CTR on other formats, and increasing their attention by 12%.
Read More: How Ad Tech Can Benefit From Human-Centric Design — Sharethrough
6. Contextual Targeting
Advertisers can use contextual targeting as a privacy centric way to reach their target audiences. SSPs use sophisticated AI and machine learning algorithms to understand the content of a site or page, determine the user’s intent, and generate the right ad, for the right impressions, at the right time.
For example, a user is reading a page about the top vacation destinations in their region. AI understands that the user wants to travel, and depending on the rest of the site content, can deliver an ad for tourism, off-road vehicles, hotels, or any other relevant ad.
Read More: Why Advertising Has Only Been Scratching The Surface Of AI — Sharethrough
The Cookiepocalypse is Here
Most of the addressable web is already cookieless and Google’s 2023 deadline to rid Chrome of third-party cookies is the final nail on the coffin, advertisers can no longer ignore the importance of first-party data. SSPs can help advertisers reach their target audiences while remaining privacy compliant by leveraging publisher first-party data to create addressable audiences through the use of seller-defined audiences, cohorts and UIDs.
Additionally, advertisers can achieve high performance on their programmatic ad campaigns through carefully curated SSP inventory based on performance signals, audiences and themes, bundled with automatic ad enhancements that improve the user experience and contextual targeting to deliver the most relevant ad for any impression.
In fact, advertisers can already make the most of a cookieless environment to reach users. Since Apple got rid of third-party cookies in Safari, advertisers can target the browser in their DSPs to reach a lucrative audience of Apple users. This also presents an opportunity to minimize CPMs by reaching an underpenetrated audience, since many other advertisers switched to targeting Chrome for its third-party cookies.
Contact us to learn more about how Sharethrough can help you improve your addressability potential and reach your targeted audiences.
Consumer privacy is now a world issue, expediting the disappearance of third-party cookies and leaving advertisers scrambling for addressability solutions to reach their target audience. And as the emphasis shifts to the contact between publishers and consumers, publishers are looking to SSPs for help to make the most of their first-party data. In this post, we cover how the direct partnership with publishers allows for SSPs to help advertisers reach their target audiences in a privacy-compliant way while still achieving high performance on their programmatic ad campaigns.
Industry Shift
Third-party cookies are going away for good soon, which is forcing advertising companies to rethink technology and how they reach consumers. Demand for greater privacy for consumers has increased, with lawmakers creating regulations and privacy procedures for how sites and companies collect, store, and transfer user data.
Additionally, browsers that already rid third-party cookies, like Safari and Firefox, and Apple giving users the option to limit tracking between apps, are creating additional barriers for advertisers. CTV, too, by nature does not include cookies because consumers use apps to access content.
This shift in the industry is placing an emphasis on the first point of contact between publishers and consumers. Through their direct partnership with publishers, suppliers are a treasure trove of consented, first-party data, making them great partners for advertisers that want to thrive in a cookieless world.
6 Ways SSPs Help Advertisers Thrive In A Cookieless World
Whether it’s reaching target audiences in a privacy-compliant way or achieving high performance on ad campaigns, there are six main ways that SSPs can help advertisers counter the lack of addressability and precision that comes with the disappearance of third-party cookies and extended privacy controls:
- Seller Defined Audiences
- Cohorts
- Universal Identifiers
- Curated Inventory
- Ad Enhancements
- Contextual Targeting
Privacy-Complaint Audience Targeting
Creating audience segments will become very difficult for advertisers without cookies. A large portion of user tracking will be enabled directly by the users themselves by either accepting first-party cookies or through Universal Identifier (UID) solutions.
Advertisers will rely more on SSPs to pass back those UIDs and publisher-controlled first-party data as Seller-Defined Audiences (SDAs) or Cohorts to the DSP.
1. Seller Defined Audiences
SSPs sift through seemingly endless amounts of publisher first-party data like a fine toothed comb to create Seller-Defined Audiences (SDAs.) Using non-Personal Identifying Information (PII), SSPs create audience segments like “Sports Fans” or “First-time Homeowners” using demographics, purchase intent and interests.
Additionally, the IAB Tech Lab is working on standardizing Seller Defined Audiences, ensuring greater transparency and trust between publishers, SSPs, and advertisers.
2. Cohorts
Cohorts are also an option for targeting users without the need for third-party cookies. The idea of cohorts is to combine similar SDAs in real-time and place these users in aggregated groups across different publishers, all without the need of third-party cookies and cross-site tracking.
3. Universal Identifiers
Where users opted-out of first-party cookies, UID solutions, like The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0, are a privacy-centric replacement of third-party cookies. Instead of tracking users between sites and pages, publishers can instead prompt users to log-in with a UID. Users create a UID profile by providing their email address or another piece of PII, which generates an encrypted UID token for the publisher.
Then, publishers relay the UID token with an ad request from the SSP, which is sent to the advertiser, allowing them to match it with their audience data or use it for frequency capping. Users remain anonymous, and publishers, advertisers, and SSPs remain privacy-compliant.
Achieving High Performance
SSPs can help advertisers achieve high performance in a cookieless world by curating their inventory into custom packages built for performance, using contextual targeting to deliver relevant ads, while applying ad enhancements that improve the user experience for added performance gains.
4. Curated Inventory
SSPs curate through their inventory of publisher sites to create custom packages tailored to improving advertisers’ performance. Whether it’s achieving a certain KPI like a target CPA, bundling sites based on events, holidays, or themes, or a myriad of other options. SSPs can create custom packages for advertisers for any ad campaign.
For example, Sharethrough’s Gen Z Audience PMP is curated using a mix of cohort and contextual targeting to include sites relevant to Gen Z.
Furthermore, advertisers can scale the reach of their digital ad campaigns through omnichannel SSPs, allowing them to reach their target audiences across any device or format.
5. Ad Enhancements
Where targeting audiences isn’t accessible, advertisers are looking for alternatives to effectively reach their target audiences. While targeting and addressability methods are the primary focus, SSPs provide advertisers with additional tools to improve the connection between their ads and their target audiences simply by focusing on the ad creative. Sharethrough is leading the way SSPs develop ad enhancements for display, video, CTV and any other ad format.
Using Human-Centric Design (HCD), a method adopted by the top performing companies around the globe which places people’s behaviors and expectations at the core of the problem-solving process.
Ad enhancements like our Enhanced Banners product, which places the ad copy in the headline space where users are more likely to read the message, increasing advertisers’ CTR by 7x. For video ads, Dynamic Captions help improve consumers’ attention to their ads by adding human-verified captions in the headline space. For platforms like CTV, that were traditionally harder for users to act on, advertisers can use Dynamic CTV QR Codes – allowing viewers to to bridge the gap between smartphones and CTV, while also providing Scan Rates, a performance signal similar to CTR on other formats, and increasing their attention by 12%.
Read More: How Ad Tech Can Benefit From Human-Centric Design — Sharethrough
6. Contextual Targeting
Advertisers can use contextual targeting as a privacy centric way to reach their target audiences. SSPs use sophisticated AI and machine learning algorithms to understand the content of a site or page, determine the user’s intent, and generate the right ad, for the right impressions, at the right time.
For example, a user is reading a page about the top vacation destinations in their region. AI understands that the user wants to travel, and depending on the rest of the site content, can deliver an ad for tourism, off-road vehicles, hotels, or any other relevant ad.
Read More: Why Advertising Has Only Been Scratching The Surface Of AI — Sharethrough
The Cookiepocalypse is Here
Most of the addressable web is already cookieless and Google’s 2023 deadline to rid Chrome of third-party cookies is the final nail on the coffin, advertisers can no longer ignore the importance of first-party data. SSPs can help advertisers reach their target audiences while remaining privacy compliant by leveraging publisher first-party data to create addressable audiences through the use of seller-defined audiences, cohorts and UIDs.
Additionally, advertisers can achieve high performance on their programmatic ad campaigns through carefully curated SSP inventory based on performance signals, audiences and themes, bundled with automatic ad enhancements that improve the user experience and contextual targeting to deliver the most relevant ad for any impression.
In fact, advertisers can already make the most of a cookieless environment to reach users. Since Apple got rid of third-party cookies in Safari, advertisers can target the browser in their DSPs to reach a lucrative audience of Apple users. This also presents an opportunity to minimize CPMs by reaching an underpenetrated audience, since many other advertisers switched to targeting Chrome for its third-party cookies.
Contact us to learn more about how Sharethrough can help you improve your addressability potential and reach your targeted audiences.
Behind Headlines: 180 Seconds in Ad Tech is a short 3-minute podcast exploring the news in the digital advertising industry. Ad tech is a fast-growing industry with many updates happening daily. As it can be hard for most to keep up with the latest news, the Sharethrough team wanted to create an audio series compiling notable mentions each week.
Consumer privacy is now a world issue, expediting the disappearance of third-party cookies and leaving advertisers scrambling for addressability solutions to reach their target audience. And as the emphasis shifts to the contact between publishers and consumers, publishers are looking to SSPs for help to make the most of their first-party data. In this post, we cover how the direct partnership with publishers allows for SSPs to help advertisers reach their target audiences in a privacy-compliant way while still achieving high performance on their programmatic ad campaigns.
Industry Shift
Third-party cookies are going away for good soon, which is forcing advertising companies to rethink technology and how they reach consumers. Demand for greater privacy for consumers has increased, with lawmakers creating regulations and privacy procedures for how sites and companies collect, store, and transfer user data.
Additionally, browsers that already rid third-party cookies, like Safari and Firefox, and Apple giving users the option to limit tracking between apps, are creating additional barriers for advertisers. CTV, too, by nature does not include cookies because consumers use apps to access content.
This shift in the industry is placing an emphasis on the first point of contact between publishers and consumers. Through their direct partnership with publishers, suppliers are a treasure trove of consented, first-party data, making them great partners for advertisers that want to thrive in a cookieless world.
6 Ways SSPs Help Advertisers Thrive In A Cookieless World
Whether it’s reaching target audiences in a privacy-compliant way or achieving high performance on ad campaigns, there are six main ways that SSPs can help advertisers counter the lack of addressability and precision that comes with the disappearance of third-party cookies and extended privacy controls:
- Seller Defined Audiences
- Cohorts
- Universal Identifiers
- Curated Inventory
- Ad Enhancements
- Contextual Targeting
Privacy-Complaint Audience Targeting
Creating audience segments will become very difficult for advertisers without cookies. A large portion of user tracking will be enabled directly by the users themselves by either accepting first-party cookies or through Universal Identifier (UID) solutions.
Advertisers will rely more on SSPs to pass back those UIDs and publisher-controlled first-party data as Seller-Defined Audiences (SDAs) or Cohorts to the DSP.
1. Seller Defined Audiences
SSPs sift through seemingly endless amounts of publisher first-party data like a fine toothed comb to create Seller-Defined Audiences (SDAs.) Using non-Personal Identifying Information (PII), SSPs create audience segments like “Sports Fans” or “First-time Homeowners” using demographics, purchase intent and interests.
Additionally, the IAB Tech Lab is working on standardizing Seller Defined Audiences, ensuring greater transparency and trust between publishers, SSPs, and advertisers.
2. Cohorts
Cohorts are also an option for targeting users without the need for third-party cookies. The idea of cohorts is to combine similar SDAs in real-time and place these users in aggregated groups across different publishers, all without the need of third-party cookies and cross-site tracking.
3. Universal Identifiers
Where users opted-out of first-party cookies, UID solutions, like The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0, are a privacy-centric replacement of third-party cookies. Instead of tracking users between sites and pages, publishers can instead prompt users to log-in with a UID. Users create a UID profile by providing their email address or another piece of PII, which generates an encrypted UID token for the publisher.
Then, publishers relay the UID token with an ad request from the SSP, which is sent to the advertiser, allowing them to match it with their audience data or use it for frequency capping. Users remain anonymous, and publishers, advertisers, and SSPs remain privacy-compliant.
Achieving High Performance
SSPs can help advertisers achieve high performance in a cookieless world by curating their inventory into custom packages built for performance, using contextual targeting to deliver relevant ads, while applying ad enhancements that improve the user experience for added performance gains.
4. Curated Inventory
SSPs curate through their inventory of publisher sites to create custom packages tailored to improving advertisers’ performance. Whether it’s achieving a certain KPI like a target CPA, bundling sites based on events, holidays, or themes, or a myriad of other options. SSPs can create custom packages for advertisers for any ad campaign.
For example, Sharethrough’s Gen Z Audience PMP is curated using a mix of cohort and contextual targeting to include sites relevant to Gen Z.
Furthermore, advertisers can scale the reach of their digital ad campaigns through omnichannel SSPs, allowing them to reach their target audiences across any device or format.
5. Ad Enhancements
Where targeting audiences isn’t accessible, advertisers are looking for alternatives to effectively reach their target audiences. While targeting and addressability methods are the primary focus, SSPs provide advertisers with additional tools to improve the connection between their ads and their target audiences simply by focusing on the ad creative. Sharethrough is leading the way SSPs develop ad enhancements for display, video, CTV and any other ad format.
Using Human-Centric Design (HCD), a method adopted by the top performing companies around the globe which places people’s behaviors and expectations at the core of the problem-solving process.
Ad enhancements like our Enhanced Banners product, which places the ad copy in the headline space where users are more likely to read the message, increasing advertisers’ CTR by 7x. For video ads, Dynamic Captions help improve consumers’ attention to their ads by adding human-verified captions in the headline space. For platforms like CTV, that were traditionally harder for users to act on, advertisers can use Dynamic CTV QR Codes – allowing viewers to to bridge the gap between smartphones and CTV, while also providing Scan Rates, a performance signal similar to CTR on other formats, and increasing their attention by 12%.
Read More: How Ad Tech Can Benefit From Human-Centric Design — Sharethrough
6. Contextual Targeting
Advertisers can use contextual targeting as a privacy centric way to reach their target audiences. SSPs use sophisticated AI and machine learning algorithms to understand the content of a site or page, determine the user’s intent, and generate the right ad, for the right impressions, at the right time.
For example, a user is reading a page about the top vacation destinations in their region. AI understands that the user wants to travel, and depending on the rest of the site content, can deliver an ad for tourism, off-road vehicles, hotels, or any other relevant ad.
Read More: Why Advertising Has Only Been Scratching The Surface Of AI — Sharethrough
The Cookiepocalypse is Here
Most of the addressable web is already cookieless and Google’s 2023 deadline to rid Chrome of third-party cookies is the final nail on the coffin, advertisers can no longer ignore the importance of first-party data. SSPs can help advertisers reach their target audiences while remaining privacy compliant by leveraging publisher first-party data to create addressable audiences through the use of seller-defined audiences, cohorts and UIDs.
Additionally, advertisers can achieve high performance on their programmatic ad campaigns through carefully curated SSP inventory based on performance signals, audiences and themes, bundled with automatic ad enhancements that improve the user experience and contextual targeting to deliver the most relevant ad for any impression.
In fact, advertisers can already make the most of a cookieless environment to reach users. Since Apple got rid of third-party cookies in Safari, advertisers can target the browser in their DSPs to reach a lucrative audience of Apple users. This also presents an opportunity to minimize CPMs by reaching an underpenetrated audience, since many other advertisers switched to targeting Chrome for its third-party cookies.
Contact us to learn more about how Sharethrough can help you improve your addressability potential and reach your targeted audiences.
Founded in 2015, Calibrate is a yearly conference for new engineering managers hosted by seasoned engineering managers. The experience level of the speakers ranges from newcomers all the way through senior engineering leaders with over twenty years of experience in the field. Each speaker is greatly concerned about the craft of engineering management. Organized and hosted by Sharethrough, it was conducted yearly in September, from 2015-2019 in San Francisco, California.
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