This isn’t another ‘cookieless’ post. You know that third-party cookies (3PCs) have been going away over the past five years, you know that they are not a great way of building quality audiences, and you’ve probably seen some pundits stating that “60% of the web is already cookieless". Ever since the world woke up to the fact that 3PCs are not as ubiquitous across web browsers as everyone was led to believe, ad tech has been head down and focused on finding new ‘signals’ to replace those evasive signals. We have scores of “cookieless solutions” claiming to save ad tech by replacing 3PCs with another ID. But aside from the fact that browsers have measures in place to turn off all IDs, even with all these ID solutions 60% the open web remains unaddressable. So where does 60% of the web end up? And why does this matter?

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Ad tech are stacking the cards against itself

Today 1000s of quality publishers are using technology to analyse their reader’s consented, first party behaviours and present these to marketers in a variety of ways. For example, they could be using IAB’s Seller Defined Audiences (SDAs) or they could be using companies like Anonymised to segment their audiences for PMP activation. Publishers can access most of the missing 60% and package these audiences up in very sophisticated ways, but the programmatic pipes simply ignore them.

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If a marketer wants to buy valuable ID-less inventory at scale, it simply can’t. At the most basic level, the SSP has an agreement with the DSP to only send bid requests with a matching ID so if the SSP cannot recognise the user in their own matching table (exchangeID) it will not send the bid request to the DSP. And even if the SSP sends a bid request stuffed full of signals (exchangeID, buyeruid, alternative IDs, contextual, SDAs, deal IDs and so on), the DSP will by and large only consider impressions with a buyeruid that they recognise. ID-less signals (like contextual and SDAs) are simply ignored if they cannot be tied to a matched buyeruid.

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And herein lies the issue, if exchangeID = 3PC and BuyerUID = 3PC, then 60% of bid requests are ignored. Concerned about the further decline of 3PCs, DSPs have developed their own  cookieless ID-graphs and are asking SSPs to send through inventory without buyeruid but with some alternative signals, and in the case of IDs we know these cover off at best 20% of the remaining inventory. Some very simple maths (60% - (60% * 20%)) shows that 48% of the web remains unaddressable because it contains none of the signals the DSP requests today. And that’s assuming that your campaign is using all possible DSPs on the market. If you use only one or two DSPs per campaign, the non-addressable web is most likely above 60%.

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ID-less is not cookieless

All the matched impressions that don’t turn into bids are what we call ID-less. It’s high-quality inventory and audience data in the market right now that no one is actively buying. We see leading DSPs and SSPs turning 100% of matched impressions into less than 10% of bid requests, and maybe 2% of bids. And then we see the winning bids performing better than 3PCs. The impressions are exactly the same - same inventory, same data - but one is bought because it can be matched to a buyeruid and the other is dropped.

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A huge amount of valuable impressions are being dropped because the technology used to buy them is addicted to ‘signals’ that should be treated as endangered species. DSPs can continue to buy ID-based impressions, but assuming that an ID-less impression is a value-less impression is wrong, short-sighted and counterproductive. It forces the whole industry to forego over half of the quality open web, overbidding on the other half and remaining dependent on ID solutions that are on the hit list of browsers and regulators. So let’s be crystal clear: cookieless solutions are not ID-Less solutions, and confusing the two is a lazy and costly mistake.

Opening up the ID-less pipes

The good news is, this is a huge opportunity today, one that will support not just innovation, but also the quality publisher and the Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) that give the industry an alternative to ‘big tech’. Reclaiming 48% of the open web means opening up quality inventory that is currently undersold.

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For advertisers, it means reaching high-quality, highly-performing audiences at a lower price (since ID-less traffic is not bid upon) - and disproportionately in the premium Apple environments. For publishers, it means increasing bid rates and CPMs on unsold or undersold inventory, driving much needed revenues. For agencies, it means delivering on clients’ KPIs more easily while returning stronger ROI. And for ad tech, it means protecting volumes while directing ad spend in more premium environments.

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We at Anonymised are already working with forward thinking SSPs to unlock the ID-less inventory, and we have engaged with smart DSP partners who are building out an ID-less buying pipe to access this untouched inventory - plus we have agencies, marketers and industry bodies supporting this work.

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There is a huge commercial opportunity in the ID-less space, but also a pressing need to establish sustainable buying mechanisms for you and your clients. It will support a future where 3PCs are no more, IP addresses have been redacted by browsers and ID solutions continue to be limited in scale (or deemed non compliant). Without alternative privacy enhancing ID-less technologies, programmatic buying of the quality web is at the whims of big tech and regulators.

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Get involved now and reclaim value from the inventory that the rest of the market is ignoring.

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