Digital Innovation Digital Publishing
3 mins read

Publishers: 3 steps to increase the value of your data

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With the end of third-party cookies in 2023, 85% of all web traffic will be unauthenticated. Some of the world’s largest publishers may take this change in stride, as they have enough first-party data to segment audiences in meaningful ways. But for the vast majority of publishers, limited first-party data makes it difficult to demonstrate value to advertisers.

One solution to this impending challenge is data enrichment, which lets publishers enhance their first-party data by linking it to second- and third-party data from a variety of sources.

Our new ebook, “Three Ways Publishers Can Profit from Data Enrichment,” explores the data enrichment process and how publishers can use it to get ahead of the cookie conundrum.

3 Steps to Profiting from Your Data

Data enrichment offers a great opportunity for publishers to drive more profit from their data. Having an experienced partner to get all the pieces in place will help you make the most of your audience. 

  1. Build your data lakeStart with the audience data you already have from sources like email capture, visitor behavior, engagement metrics, demographic data, and content consumption. Working with Sovrn and our data collective, you can then enrich your unauthenticated first-party data with hashed emails, mobile ad identifiers (MAIDs), and other off-domain insights. We can also help you create segments to help advertisers with audience targeting.
  2. Test in Safari. Keep in mind that browsers like Safari and Firefox – which currently support 40% of all web traffic – are already free of third-party cookies. This creates a perfect test environment to ensure your monetization strategies will be effective in a cookie-free world. Sovrn can help you identify and run the right tests to build a future-proof model for monetization.
  3. Monetize your authenticated traffic. Once your data has been collected and enriched, Sovrn can help to activate your audience segments with advertisers and optimize your monetization strategy. This involves creating deals and passing segments and deal IDs in the bidstream, while maintaining compliance with all applicable data privacy and security requirements. A partner like Sovrn can help you transact on the segments, communicating data in a way that prevents data leakage while maximizing the value of your audience.

The Benefits of Publisher Data Enrichment

The demise of third-party cookies creates challenges across the advertising ecosystem. Publishers will lose a critical data source for demonstrating the value of their ad inventory, while ad buyers will struggle to evaluate audience segments for pricing and bidding.

By increasing the proportion of authenticated site traffic, data enrichment addresses these concerns and offers significant benefits for publishers and advertisers alike.

  • For publishers, data enrichment enhances the value of ad inventory and drives higher bids. In addition, analytics tools like Sovrn //Signal let publishers build more robust visitor models that help advertisers understand audience behaviors and preferences. 
  • For advertisers, data enrichment provides more reliable audience segments based on verifiable data. It also allows for better audience targeting, leading to improved campaign performance and increased return on ad spend. 

Ready to Get Started?

Now is the time to start building a monetization strategy for the post-cookie world – leveraging the expertise of a data enrichment partner. 

Start by downloading our new ebook, “Three Ways Publishers Can Profit from Data Enrichment.” 

Sovrn Publisher Advocate