Gumtree uses publisher provided identifiers to support the re-commerce industry
Success Story

Gumtree uses publisher provided identifiers to support the re-commerce industry

Gumtree, one of the UK’s largest online classifieds sites with a community where people can discover, buy or sell second-hand goods and motors, has been championing “re-commerce” for over 20 years. Gumtree has a vision to ensure everything can find a new purpose and is on a mission to make trading second-hand goods easy, simple and safe for everyone.

Evolving expectations towards privacy and their personal data is making it increasingly difficult for Gumtree to reach and measure audiences on its sites. To develop a sustainable ecosystem where Gumtree can support their users’ journeys with more relevant ads, they tested Google Ad Manager’s publisher provided identifiers.

Providing buyers and markets with effective signals

As the industry continues to move away from third-party cookies and identifiers that track users across the web, Gumtree wanted to explore solutions that provided signals that would provide high value for their advertisers. Publisher provided identifiers enabled Gumtree to share pseudonymized first-party identifiers with Google’s programmatic demand, on Gumtree.com.

Enabling publisher provided identifiers for programmatic allowed advertisers to serve personalized ads as well as protect the consumer experience with capabilities like frequency capping, all while protecting people’s privacy.

“One of our top priorities is finding new, privacy-first and durable approaches to better monetize our audiences, without relying on third-party cookies. That’s why we tested publisher provided identifiers for programmatic with Google. By making this identifier available to programmatic buyers, we observed significant revenue improvements in situations where third-party cookies were not available.”

Victoria Trevillion, Head of Advertising Technology, Gumtree.com

Increasing privacy while monetizing audiences

Gumtree saw an immediate benefit by opening access to new demand. Where third-party identifiers were not available, Gumtree saw improved buyer targeting and performance in the Open Auction (+27% average programmatic eCPM), and a 15% uplift in ad revenue.

“eCPM is substantially higher when publisher provided identifiers is active, across all browsers and devices, which improved our monetisation, especially in environments challenging to monetise. Opting into the publisher provided identifiers program was very easy, implementation instructions were straightforward and the Google team helped us to unpick and understand the data.”

Anna Lounis, Head of Advertising Yield, Gumtree.com

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