Note: We provided an overview of Ads Data hub in Part 1. In this post, we look at how Ads Data Hub will impact DMP’s in general.
Data management platforms (DMPs) power the marketer’s ability to track, segment, and target audiences across programmatic media. Leading DMP solutions include Salesforce DMP (previously known as Krux), Neustar IDMP, Oracle BlueKai and Adobe Audience Manager.
If you weren’t paying close attention, you may not realize that the changes Google have announced have blown a hole in your DMP.
Two major capabilities are affected by the pending DoubleClick ID removal from logs and push toward using Google’s Ads Data Hub: (1) segmentation and (2) frequency capping.
First, marketers currently use DMPs to create new audience segments based on media exposure. A DMP can keep track of media exposure if its own tags/pixels can run with the ad, but on many publisher inventory such as Google’s Ad Exchange, DMPs are banned from running their code. These publishers are worried about data leakage, which happens when the DMP pixels proprietary audiences on media (such as sports lovers on ESPN.com) and purchased these users elsewhere without paying the publisher.
Historically, the DMP could still get a record of media exposure from the ad server such as DoubleClick, which would share data on who saw the ads running. Using DoubeClick’s data, the marketer could then still segment audiences within the DMP based on who saw the ad, who converted, etc.
Now that Google has discontinued the sharing of logs with IDs, DMPs are no longer able to see media exposure on either inventories on which they are explicitly banned and or inventories where they are allowed to operate but that Google’s DoubleClick ad server is used by the advertiser. If DMPs are to continue to be useful to the marketer, they will need a new source of data.
Second, some marketers use DMPs to create frequency caps across media platforms. By getting their pixel/code to run with an ad, or by ingesting ad serving logs, DMPs can count impressions exposed to a particular user ID and then send a signal to platforms like DSPs to stop buying a user after a certain amount of exposure. However, without log level data, DMPs will not be able to count frequency for inventory in which they are banned, leading to less accurate frequency measurement and therefore less precise frequency capping.
How do I keep my DMP running at full performance?
Marketers who have invested in a DMP and want to keep its capabilities at full power would be advised to either buy more digital media that allow DMP tracking or find an alternative ad tracking or serving solution that can data transfer log files to the DMP. A combination of these two strategies would allow a brand to continue using its DMP to its fullest by giving the DMP the complete picture of ad exposure tied to person.
If you want to add an independent ad tracker to your DoubleClick stack or to keep powering your DMP with data, talk to Thunder about our Experience Measurement solution.
More on the Ads Data Hub series
