Revenue, Reach, Resilience: Identity Strategy is a Top Priority for Publishers

The digital advertising landscape is undergoing seismic change, driven by a profound shift toward a privacy-first internet. With the deprecation of third-party cookies, the decreasing utility of mobile advertising IDs, and new privacy features that can reduce the precision of a user's IP address, the traditional foundation of audience targeting is completely transforming.

In addition, traditional identifiers that once enabled seamless cross-channel audience targeting are diminishing. Global privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, new browser technologies that actively limit cross-site tracking, and the expansion of device use are leaving publishers with fragmented data and growing signal loss.

74% of publishers and media networks are still heavily reliant on third-party cookies and shared identifiers to deliver on their monetization strategies.
Optable | Digiday Report

To succeed in this new ecosystem, publishers must fundamentally redefine addressability, creating direct connections with audiences, emphasizing trust, and ensuring data security.  

Publishers and media owners who build strong, future-proof identity strategies rooted in first-party data, consent-driven strategies, and technologies that scale with privacy regulations will emerge as leaders. 

Key drivers for adopting a comprehensive identity strategy include: 

• Crafting a robust first-party and authentication strategy
• Deploying an identity foundation that supports new value-generating opportunities
• Supporting multiple identity providers to ensure maximum coverage
• Adopting tools that offer flexible data controls and transparency to adhere to privacy rules and regulations 

Identity management is a strategic imperative that plays a key role in determining a publisher's revenue, reach, and long-term competitiveness. Ensuring that their identity strategy is equally effective, efficient, and compliant is crucial for publishers to sustain audience monetization and advertiser trust.

Lay the Foundation for Identity Management Success

For publishers, a first-party identity graph is the central map for understanding their audience, tying together all the scattered information a user generates across the web. When someone visits a site on their phone, then their desktop, and later signs up for an email, they create multiple, isolated data points. The essential job of the graph is to perform identity resolution, a continuous process of matching and linking all those separate bits of data together. This creates a single, complete profile for that individual or household, giving the publisher a unified view of who the user is and what they do.

Building and owning this identity graph is crucial because it gives publishers full control over their audience data, reducing dependency on external signals. The identity graph becomes the central hub for managing and expanding first-party data, allowing publishers to strategically determine data sources, control privacy, and enrich the data with industry partners.

Crucially, leveraging an owned graph that’s flexible and extensible helps protect the business against programmatic changes. By resolving identities across all touchpoints, the graph maximizes addressable audiences and improves targeting accuracy, which ultimately strengthens the overall revenue strategy across both direct sales and programmatic channels.

To successfully implement a flexible identity foundation, publishers must start with strategic alignment across all teams and clear business goals. Successful organizations avoid siloing identity projects, recognizing they touch every corner of the business, from ad operations and data teams to legal stakeholders. This cross-functional approach ensures the identity graph is tied to measurable objectives and provides the strongest foundation for controlled addressability and revenue growth.

Key steps include:

• Forming a cross-functional workgroup to oversee requirements gathering, use case prioritization, and execution
• Developing well-defined, measurable KPIs (e.g., eCPM lift, match rate improvement, and time-to-integration of new sources) that are correlated with clear tracking methodologies to ensure progress and accountability
• Aligning with privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA to build user trust and ensure compliance

By treating identity as a company-wide initiative, publishers establish the operational foundation for scalable, compliant, and effective strategies.

Choose the Right Data and Technology Partners to Maximize Value

For publishers, the true power of an identity graph lies in the quality and depth of the data fueling it. To enhance audience insights, optimize monetization strategies, and deliver better advertising outcomes, choosing the right data and technology partners is critical, ensuring the resulting system is scalable and can help with compliance. 

Different types of partners help publishers maximize audience value by:

• Extending the reach and accuracy of a publisher’s identity graph by linking additional identifiers, such as universal IDs, hashed emails, or deterministic and probabilistic matching solutions. Identity enrichment partners help bridge identity gaps across devices and platforms, ensuring seamless audience recognition in both authenticated and anonymous environments.
• Offering demographic, behavioral, and interest-based data to complement first-party signals. Audience attribute enrichment partners (third-party data providers) enable deeper audience segmentation, allowing publishers to create more relevant and engaging ad experiences to be sold directly to their advertising partners.
• Helping publishers to elevate the quality and relevance of their ad inventory through enhanced audience attributes and refined segmentation. Audience curation partners often utilize advanced algorithms and expert oversight to curate premium inventory for advertising. 
• Providing essential insights that enable publishers to understand the effectiveness of their advertising strategies and share those results with advertising partners. Measurement partners offer unique data sets and analytics capabilities that can help publishers prove the ROI of their advertising campaigns. 

Best Practice
When testing multiple identity enrichment partners, establish a well-structured control group to measure incremental value accurately. Test partners one at a time to isolate their impact, or if testing with overlap such as 95/5, ensure your control group excludes enriched data from all providers. This approach prevents data duplication and gives a clearer picture of each partner’s unique contribution to audience reach and performance.

Unlock New Revenue Opportunities with Identity Graphs

Once a publisher’s identity graph is in place, it becomes a strategic asset that unlocks new monetization opportunities, enhances ad targeting, and strengthens publisher-advertiser relationships to drive revenue. By identifying use cases that maximize return on investment, publishers can transform their identity foundation into a competitive advantage, increasing bid values, improving addressability, and unlocking new revenue streams.

Leading publishers define high-ROI use cases and build their identity strategy around them. By clearly defining ROI-focused use cases, publishers avoid spreading resources thin and maximize the business impact of identity initiatives. Use cases that can unleash effective data monetization strategies include programmatic monetization and direct ad sales.

Examples of programmatic monetization include:

• Signal enrichment: Publishers can grow programmatic by adding valuable signals such as contextual metadata, user behavior, first-party insights, and data provenance to bid requests. This enables advertisers to target trusted audiences more precisely, increasing bid values and competition for inventory.
• Audience curation: Publishers can collaborate with data providers, agencies, or supply-side platforms (SSPs) to create premium, high-value inventory segments across multiple publisher-operated domains. These curated deals offer advertisers exclusive, high-performing inventory with enhanced targeting and measurement capabilities.
• Data marketplace monetization: Publishers can generate additional revenue by packaging and selling anonymized audience segments or contextual data through data marketplaces. Advertisers use this high-quality, privacy-compliant data to enhance targeting and improve campaign performance.

Direct ad sales use cases include:

• Increased addressability: Publishers can meet advertisers’ demands by leveraging first-party data and contextual insights to create compelling packages based on content dynamics and audience behavior. Developing audiences with first-party data and a strong identity foundation helps maximize advertiser reach while meeting audience targeting requirements.
• Audience enrichment: Publishers can grow direct ad sales by external data partnerships to build more valuable audience profiles. By providing advertisers with enriched audience targeting capabilities, publishers can justify premium pricing and improve campaign performance.
• Advertiser data collaboration: Publishers can work closely with brands and agencies to develop highly targeted campaigns, such as custom media plans, tailored audience segments, or unique measurement solutions. By aligning inventory and data with advertiser goals, publishers can offer differentiated, high-impact ad opportunities that drive better results.

Expand Beyond Programmatic Advertising to New Opportunities

Investing heavily in owned identity graphs and first-party data infrastructure will define the leaders in the next era of privacy-focused advertising. While maximizing programmatic and direct ad revenue is often the immediate driver, strong identity management offers much deeper organizational benefits. A composable and extensible identity graph not only unlocks short-term revenue gains but also creates long-term strategic advantages, leading to enhanced organizational efficiencies, better audience experiences, and the flexibility to explore valuable new opportunities with advertising partners.

Publishers are using their identity graphs to:

• Centralize advertising and marketing teams on common technology for optimal audience experiences: A strong identity infrastructure is key not only to advertising teams focused on monetization but also to marketing teams tasked with growing visitors and engagement to a publisher’s or media owner’s properties. To truly embrace content relevancy and personalization, both teams need information about their audiences.
• Break down data silos and create a deeper understanding of audience value: Identity graphs are a key input to business intelligence. The ability of an identity graph to tie audience behavior across various areas of a publisher’s network, as well as multiple sites, means it is crucial in their ability to understand audience lifetime value, acquisition costs, and other key metrics.
• Form partnerships for non-traditional methods of monetization: Many publishers and media owners possess incredibly unique insights about their audiences that can be valuable both to other publishers and to advertisers and even to adjacent businesses. Data clean room technologies can enable publishers to safely sync their data with other partners without sharing private information about their audiences. This puts publishers in a position to explore new forms of monetization, such as licensing agreements or data cooperatives, to establish new revenue streams.
• Power the next generation of agentic AI systems: By providing AI agents with a flexible, comprehensive identity foundation, publishers can facilitate the secure and efficient interaction of buy- and sell-side agents within data clean room environments.

Choose Optable for Identity Management

Optable is the identity management and data collaboration platform designed for the advertising ecosystem in the age of privacy. We empower media owners, publishers, and platforms to harness the power of their first-party data. Our platform makes it easy to assemble an identity graph across all sources, enrich it with leading partner data sets, and use the identity graph for activation in the channels that matter the most.

Ad sellers need a complete set of tools to support the many different ways that they monetize their audience data. For programmatic revenue, Optable makes it easy to plug into ID frameworks like UID 2.0, ID5, Yahoo Connect ID, and many others. Additionally, publishers with unique first-party audience data can port data into leading marketplaces like The Trade Desk and curation platforms such as Pubmatic and Index Exchange. This allows publishers to explore different monetization strategies and meet buyers where they are looking to activate.

Data-driven sales teams win more share of ad spend. Optable makes it easy for media owners to collect, analyze, and activate audience data, no matter how complex their network or distribution is. Optable’s purpose-built tools for signal enrichment, audience building, attribute enrichment, clean room collaboration, and agentic audience planning mean that sales teams can respond faster to RFPs, deliver more relevant audiences, and offer deeper insights to their advertising partners.

Optable’s identity solutions have transformed the way we manage data, offering unparalleled control and insights. We’ve seen significant improvements in yield optimization, making it an invaluable part of our programmatic strategy.” - Patrick McCann, Senior Vice President of Research, Raptive

Take control of your future in digital media with confidence. Contact Optable today to learn how our identity management solutions can help you!