If you're a publisher looking for new privacy-preserving data solutions ahead of third-party cookie deprecation, you're not alone. Graham Media Group (GMG), a broadcast television group who owns seven local television stations around the US, was in the same position. To address this challenge, GMG began exploring ways to create value by developing first-party audiences across their digital channels. To activate their audience data, GMG looked to Google Ad Manager’s publisher provided identifiers (PPIDs).
PPIDs are a durable, privacy-forward solution generated by publishers who have direct relationships with their users. They’re continuing to grow in popularity because they use a publisher’s first-party data to unlock capabilities like ad personalization, frequency management, and more in browsers where third-party cookies are restricted.
Survey-based first-party audiences
To reduce their reliance on third-party data, GMG started exploring the use of custom surveys to collect consented information from their audiences directly. They used their customer data platform, BlueConic, to create surveys on their website that asked visitors questions that would help gauge their interest in a specific subject, such as home improvement.
Within three weeks of the start of their initial test, GMG had collected over 21,000 survey responses from their audiences. When people engaged with a survey, BlueConic used their responses to map them to different audience segments. GMG then created a unique publisher provided identifier for each respondent and batch-uploaded the segments into Ad Manager.
Boosting performance with first-party data
Once their first-party audiences were added to Ad Manager, GMG identified two advertiser campaigns that would be good opportunities to test PPIDs, both of which were for advertisers looking to reach home improvement intenders. To evaluate performance, they designed a three-arm study, with two data-driven arms and one control arm. GMG was sure to use the same creatives for all three approaches.
For the first arm of the experiment they activated their first-party audiences that were built using survey data. For the second arm, they applied a third-party home improvement audience segment. For the control arm, they applied no audience data.
Once all three arms had reached a total of 75,000 impressions, GMG began to evaluate the campaigns’ performance. The results were clear. GMG’s PPIDs and first-party audience data produced a 29% higher click-through rate (CTR) than the control arm, and a 20% higher CTR than the arm using third-party data.
Innovating across platforms
GMG is currently working to field additional surveys to gather demographic signals and build additional audience categories such as auto and travel intenders. Their long-term vision is to use the first-party data collected across their web channels to train look-alike models to build audience segments across their Connected TV offerings.
By investing in creative strategies to capture and activate first-party data, like surveys and publisher provided identifiers, Graham Media Group is preparing its digital advertising business for the future. “Publishers must evolve to thrive in the next era of digital advertising,” Newman said. “Google Ad Manager enables us to easily activate our audiences in new and exciting ways,” he added.