Brands proactively testing alternative ways to find audiences, without using third-party cookies, are also wasting a chunk of that budget on sending too many ads to a narrow slice of publisher inventory, new data from the demand-side platform (DSP) Adform reveals.

When buyers test alternative identifiers, like ID5, UID2, RampID, or a whole host of others, it’s mostly in environments where cookies do not exist, like Firefox and Apple’s Safari and iOS.

While traffic in these environments is plentiful—Safari had a 33% market share of all browsers among U.S. users last month, according to StatCounter—supply-side platforms (SSPs) choose not to monetize the vast majority of cookieless traffic when cookies are still available.

“[SSP] algorithms are … set up so that if the third-party cookie is there, [they] use that,” said a source familiar with the matter, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Which I can’t fault them for. That’s the thing that their decision algorithm has been trained on for the last decade.”

That lower addressable audience leads to over-targeting and wastage.

Despite the industry calls for more testing, which will continue as Google has pushed back the deadline for cookie deprecation again, in a system still oriented toward cookies, it can be hard for brands to get accurate data and run effective cookieless campaigns, four ad-tech sources said.

Wastage from over-targeting the same users

Because SSPs only make a narrow slice of cookieless inventory available, brands waste money over-targeting the same users with ads, particularly if they rely on only one alt ID, said John Piccone, regional president of the Americas at Adform. 

The exact amount of money a brand might waste depends on the specifics of its campaign. Hypothetically, if an advertiser spent $1 million to reach 50 million people with a $6 CPM and optimal frequency of seven, they would waste $217,000, more than 20% of their budget, on excessive frequency, Piccone said.

Adform’s figures are hypothetical but based on real rates of alt ID inventory. The DSP sells a product called ID Fusion that adds the inventory of multiple IDs together, reducing this potential waste, so it has some skin in the game. More than 90% of Adform’s clients use ID Fusion.

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