The Pubs Are Here To Save The Day 💪 🔥

Published: Fri, 03/25/22

How publishers are set to help advertisers to fill the data void

By replacing Google's Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) with Topics and extending the Privacy Sandbox to Android, the digital marketing industry is once again reminded of the difficult balance between engaging audiences and protecting data.

Marketers may have limited pools of data at their disposal, but publishers have this valuable resource in abundance. These data pools will provide publishers with valuable insights to help advertisers more precisely target their ads in this world with no cookies.

In light of ongoing privacy changes and restrictive targeting solutions proposed by tech giants, how can publishers leverage their granular data assets? How can they make the most of first-party data and provide advertisers with dynamic, enriched insights through it?

The privacy landscape continues to shift

Google has instead chosen to use Topics, offering category-based consumer insights instead of FLOCs, amid concerns that user tracking could still occur. Approximately five top categories, chosen at random from a pool of 350, are assigned to individuals each week, and three are shared with advertisers for targeting purposes.

Although this proposal aims to provide further protection for users’ identities, some commentators are concerned that the topics within the framework are too generic to provide granular insights and accurate targeting.

As a result, the relevance of ads may decrease. It is also difficult to plan future campaign optimisation once only non-specific interests are available to advertisers.

Google's recent move intensifies the urgency of finding viable privacy-compliant alternatives against a backdrop of diminishing identifiers, as Apple's App Tracking Transparency already creates additional steps for data collection. Publishers play an essential role here.

Why are publishers so valuable?

In addition to signup data, login details, email addresses, and demographic information, publishers can leverage their close and trusted relationships with their audiences to generate a steady stream of first-party data.

As a result, they are more likely to gain consent to collect and use audience data than less established or smaller brands that do not always have direct relationships with consumers.

Advertisers can offer contextually relevant inventory based on publishers' individualised knowledge of their audiences.

Besides data points within untapped interactions between users and owned websites, publishers also possess other strengths.

Indications of audience behaviour, such as entries into competitions, website searches, and clicks to affiliated links, are easy to collect and process, and can be used to gain enriched insights about users without identifying any specific people.

A publisher's strengths, as described above, are perhaps more in demand than ever before due to their in-depth layers of audience data that complement and deepen cookieless solutions such as Google Topics, which offer partially limited targeting capabilities.

Moreover, with proposed tools favouring more broad, category-based insights, publishers may be able to provide more precise contextual information about each segment if they can dynamically amend overall overviews.

By collaborating with advertisers on priority topics and providing advertisers with greater depth to improve their campaign results, there is an opportunity to generate higher revenue streams through partnerships. In spite of the wealth of data available to publishers about their audiences, many are yet to utilize this source of insight in a meaningful way..

Taking first-party data to the next level

Incomplete or contrasting data sets can often lead to missed details, but technology and AI-enabled tools can help make the most of any information available.

First, it allows for the management of disordered data sets into single, comprehensible formats which can be easily analyzed. In addition to identifying data gaps, this process also enables more precise targeting and segmentation by creating a holistic view of the user journey.

In addition to offering advertisers forward-looking insights with the help of AI, publishers also offer advertisers predictive modelling, which predicts outcomes based on historical data, rather than being purely reflective.

The publishers can also provide transparency and an entire picture of audiences and engagement, as opposed to black boxes from walled gardens. Thus, they are able to both fill the gap left by the absence of third-party cookies and provide marketers with a tool for predicting consumer preferences and optimizing future campaigns.

We constantly remind players in the digital ecosystem that audience data is diminishing. Thus, publishers should use privacy-compliant targeting solutions to aid advertisers and enrich their first-party data stores.

With the right AI-powered tools, publishers can give their data a dynamic not available from simpler alternatives, allowing advertisers to reach audiences that would otherwise be unreachable.

Publishers can therefore provide advertisers with the granular data they still crave for effective targeting - either by themselves or by collaborating with tech giants to enhance their solutions.