• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 30, 2022

ID5 and Sovrn executives believe they found a way to help publishers unlock an increase in eCPMs of nearly two times greater. Amidst the many challenges -- identity and how marketers dictate the value of ad opportunities through third-party data validation is changing.

Collaborative tests that began between the two companies and Monumetric, an ad network, and many publishers set out to prove there are privacy-safe ways to use data.

Monumetric, an early tester of the project, tied Sovrn’s feed of second-party data to its first-party ID, which made one in four of the users addressable with a hashed email. Sovrn provides digital advertising, affiliate marketing and data products across 60,000 websites.

Monumetric was one of the test publishers, but the team ran the test across nine publishers.

“This is not a couple of percentage points, but rather one in four users in the U.S. linked to a hashed email address,” says Peter Cunha, managing director at Sovrn, who heads up the ad management business and managed services. “The impact on yield that it had was significant — a 98% delta between a hashed and no-hashed email being passed through.”  

When asked whether there is potential to improve on that eCPM, Cunha said the team is still sifting through much of that data, to understand exactly where the increase occurred.

The team saw a 98% eCPM increase across the board on blended traffic.

Publishers who participated in the test split their traffic into three groups: Group A - Control, Group B - HEM linked and passed, and Group C - HEM linked and not passed

For those in Group B, where the HEM was linked and passed, publishers experienced a 98% CPM uplift and for those in Group C, where the HEM was linked but not passed, publishers experienced a 72% uplift.

One unanswered question, he said, is whether the lift was more pronounced in non-addressable environments vs. Chrome, for example. That’s a number the team doesn’t quite "have a firm handle on, because of some limitations from reporting," he said.

Much of the reporting that was received back from publishers, using Google Ad Manager, relied on identifying “key value pairs” to report back on the split traffic tests, the delineation between Group A, B, and C.

“Publishers could not break down the data and send it back to use, so we are looking to Sovrn reporting to help fill in the blanks,” he says.

Cunha says the team focused on specific signals for the trial, but in the future the opportunity will be in understanding how to help publishers fill in the gaps on much of the non-addressable information that they “pump into the ecosystem”

It will be important to look into browsers such as Apple Safari to understand just how signal-less those environments are and how the ad requests come through. There are opportunities to help publishers fill in the gaps.

Morwenna Beales, vice president of global strategic partnerships at ID5, attributes the signal to the increase. “The outcome of this test demonstrates that there are privacy-safe solutions for publishers to leverage data-sets to enrich and segment their first-party data,” said Morwenna Beales, VP Strategic partnerships at ID5. “The partnership with Sovrn represents another effective tool to meet our commitment.”

Sovrn also ran a test in which Sovrn Signal matched participating publisher first-party IDs to consented and permissioned hashed emails (HEMs) in the Sovrn Data Collective. Publishers then passed the HEM to ID5, which attached it to the ID5 ID and passed it to all SSPs supporting the identifier. Sovrn linked permissioned first-party data from the Sovrn Data Collective on each applicable user visit to an ID5 ID, which was then passed to buyers to evaluate.

The lift associated with a HEM being passed through to ID5 was 72%.

The test ran during the summer of 2022 and relied on publisher data. To measure the impact across all their assets required being diligent in how the information fed into and out of the publishers’, ID5’s and Sovrn’s systems.

The two believe this “turning point in the industry” will give publishers and advertisers more verification and validation by providing their own signals.