Audience Measurement in the Post-Cookie World

Published March 20, 2024

The success of every campaign hinges on the marketer reaching the right audience. Third-party cookies dropped into the users’ browsers have long served as proxies for interest and intent. Although far from perfect, third-party cookies helped marketers measure the audiences for their campaigns.

Now that cookies are going away, marketers are looking for suitable alternatives. Panels are making a comeback, as we see many companies offering them up as a way to gauge consumer interest in a product or service. In some instances, panels make sense, such as the case with CTV.

But panels come with their own set of challenges. To begin with, panels are both expensive and resource heavy. This means panel measurement is often outside the budget and capacity of most advertisers. Panels have limited sample sizes. And consumers who participate in panels are often compensated, which can influence their behavior, and thus, the data. There’s also the challenge of the Hawthorne Effect, the phenomenon where individuals modify or improve an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed. But perhaps the greatest challenge of all is that the disappearing third-party cookie makes conducting panel measurement even more challenging.

Marketers have always relied on past success to make decisions about future marketing campaign tactics, but those signals are often skewed in the iOS world. Safari users are tracked only if they’ve enabled tracking, a small subset of the user population, and probably not a very good proxy for the consumer in general.

The Solution – Digiseg

Digiseg measurement tags allow you to validate your campaign audience. Our tags are identifiers that allow you to segment audiences anonymously based on household and neighborhood attributes. Let’s say you’re an auto-supplies brand and you ran a campaign targeting automobile owners. Did you reach the right audience? Or were your ads targeted at people who rely on public transportation for all their traveling needs? This is the question Digiseg data allows you to answer. It provides an end report of who your campaign reached, enabling you to evaluate your targeting criteria and the inventory you purchase for your campaigns.

How it Works

  1. Get your Digiseg measurement tag.
  2. Include the Digiseg measurement tag on your creative in your DSP or ad server.
  3. Digiseg will deliver a profile of your audience delivery once your campaign is complete. Compare who you actually reached to who you wanted to reach.

What can you do with a campaign profile?

  1. Validate audience profile against selected targeting. Did you reach the intended target group
  2. Validate total impressions served
  3. Validate impression frequency on household level

Why is a campaign profile valuable?

Agencies and publishers using third-party campaign validation will improve transparency which improves trust and leads to repeat business.

Start measuring your audience today.

To learn more or to ask questions contact our Customer Success Director, Jakub Skwarski – js@digiseg.io

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