Next-Gen Solutions now available on the web

by Giovanni Gardelli, Sr. Dir, Product Management, Yahoo

One of the ad industry's lessons from the last year is that the identity-constrained future has become a reality. Privacy-related laws and consumer protection regulations emerged worldwide. At the same time, Apple finally implemented its long-awaited privacy updates to iOS 14, which to date, has led to 75% of its users opting out.¹

And while Google delayed the deprecation of third-party cookies on Chrome to the end of 2023, today, the market share of Safari and Firefox browsers where cookies are already restricted is 40%.²

ID solutions can be effective for addressable inventory, but what happens with non-addressable inventory? This inventory includes all cases where ID solutions can’t help identify the user, like the iOS 14 in-app inventory where users haven’t given consent for tracking or cookieless traffic on web inventory when the user is unknown.

The identity-constrained future is a two-sided challenge – when identifiers are present and when they can’t be used.  To be successful, advertisers and publishers need to adopt solutions for both.

Yahoo offers an integrated approach to identity. Yahoo ConnectID for ID-based inventory and Next-Gen Solutions for ID-less inventory.

What’s Next-Gen Solutions?

In the absence of identity, Yahoo Next-Gen Solutions is a suite of end-to-end targeting, buying and measurement products, beyond cookies, content and app advertising IDs.

Next-Gen Audiences takes an innovative, privacy-centric approach to audience creation by leveraging our unique Yahoo ConnectID data as a sample and machine learning. This advanced contextual targeting solution goes well beyond content and does it at scale. At the same time It’s privacy-proofed and doesn’t apply fingerprinting.

With Next-Gen Audiences, consumers enjoy relevant ad experiences, advertisers reach high-value audiences at scale and publishers better monetize ID-less users even in ID-less digital environments.

What’s new for the new year?

Next-Gen Solutions has been available for in-app inventory since 2021. Today, we're happy to announce we've expanded this offering to the web. All Next-Gen Audiences, including demo, interest and income will now be available on the web and available on all publishers’ inventory that have adopted Yahoo ConnectID. We're also launching a brand new audience category: Next-Gen Lookalike Audiences, which is now available in the Yahoo DSP for both in-app and web inventory. With Next-Gen Lookalike Audiences, you create a seed set of user characteristics to find bid requests similar to the seed  – using only contextual and other real-time signals.

What makes Next-Gen Audiences unique?

Yahoo ConnectID as a sample for quality audience creation: Next-Gen Audiences work without user identifiers, like cookies or mobile IDs. Our algorithm uses a sample of identity traffic to infer audience characteristics from publishers who have adopted Yahoo ConnectID.

Leveraging Yahoo ConnectID data as an input ensures higher quality training data for the Next-Gen algorithm and future-proofs Next-Gen Audiences despite the deprecation of cookies. Today, more than 12,000 web domains have implemented Yahoo ConnectID, including Yahoo properties and leading publishers like CafeMedia, Buzzfeed and Maven, with more in the works.

Going beyond Advanced Contextual Targeting: Most contextual solutions rely exclusively on content and don't consider any other real-time signals. Some deliver ads by targeting websites – not audiences. More advanced solutions create audiences but are based only on content consumption.

Next-Gen Audiences considers a mix of real-time signals received on the bid request, including content, location, weather, device type, and more. Our testing and analysis have proven that content contributes less than 50% to the inferred audiences' accuracy. So, it alone isn’t as effective for audience creation.  

It’s privacy-proof, not fingerprinting applied: At Yahoo, we've always taken a consumer-first approach. One of our principles is building products that respect their privacy. Next-Gen Solutions is built to comply with changing and emerging privacy laws regarding tracking. We don't apply fingerprinting, we don't store user profiles or aim to follow users across the web.

Results

In early testing, we saw increased impressions and clicks on non-addressable inventory when Next-Gen Solutions was activated. More specifically, advertisers achieved 39% incremental reach on average for ID-less audiences that they’d have missed otherwise. Additionally, there was an average of 20% increase in clicks for these audiences.

Going public when it comes to consumer privacy doesn’t mean you have to operate in the dark. With innovative tools like Next-Gen Solutions and Yahoo ConnectID, advertisers and publishers can continue to create unique, lasting consumer connections that drive growth.

To learn how we can help you deliver more relevant experiences, increase monetization and performance with Next-Gen Solutions, let’s connect today.

¹ Balasubramanian, Manoj, 15 December 2021. “App tracking transparency opt-in rate - monthly updates,” Flurry.com.

² StatCounter, “Browser market share in the Unites Sates of America – Jan. 2021 - Jan. 2022,” GSStatCounter.com.