The clandestine swapping out of IDs in cookieless environments without consent hampers the campaign performance, data shows. Go figure.
These practices, dubbed ID spoofing, have been under increased scrutiny since February and are the subject of conversations within the IAB Tech Lab. It’s tricky to detect when ID spoofing is happening, and this will only get harder with cookie deprecation.
Data from demand-side platform Basis Technologies found that when publishers and supply-side platforms use techniques disguised as regular cookie-based targeting, conversion rates decline.
“For the campaigns that we’re buying that had very high level of ID integrity … the conversion rate is the highest,” said Ian Trider, vice president of product, DSP at Basis Technologies.
There are several adtech reasons why ID spoofing is bubbling up. Auctions with IDs monetize higher than those without, so there’s some incentive for SSPs to maintain signal. Buy-side tech firms believe they’re bidding on users via a cookie, but the sell side is using other methods to identify users. Some on the sell side say they are being transparent.
ID bridging across browsers occurs when a publisher uses a signal like an email or IP address to link a user on Safari with who they are on Chrome. The DSP will treat these impressions like any other group of Chrome users, but this user cannot be tracked throughout the web.
Basis explored the impact of this practice by looking at the rates of ID consistency for 3,126 campaigns on the web during the first week of February. Ideally, the cookie in the bid request should be consistent with the cookie on the actual ad impression close to 100% of the time.
If not, ID bridging—or even outright fraud—could be at play.
An anonymous source from a second DSP also uses this methodology to understand the scope of ID spoofing.
Sure enough, Basis found that for campaigns where the average consistency rate between bid and impression was near 100%, 6% of ad impressions resulted in conversions. But when the consistency rate was below 50%, the conversion rate was mostly below 1%. In this case, a conversion is any event an advertiser would want to optimize for, from viewing an ad to going to a brand’s website to buying a product.