Month: March 2021

Yahoo’s redesign comes as an already competitive media industry tries to strengthen first-party data sets that can be used for content personalization and advertising, as forced changes to data collection (including the loss of third-party cookies in Chrome browsers) grow nearer and are poised to force a reckoning.

Yahoo continues to enjoy a massive audience. In January 2021, more than 180 million people visited its site, roughly the same number as visited in January 2020, according to Comscore. Although Yahoo’s traffic has held steady, advertisers’ interest has slackened in the shadow of its parent organization. Three agency executives who spoke to Digiday for this story said the Yahoo brand was not as attractive to advertisers as its parent company Verizon Media Group due to issues with engagement, ad performance and targeting.

The real value of Yahoo is its dataset, which comes not just from Yahoo but Verizon Media Group as a whole, said Christine Peterson, executive director of U.S. digital investment at WPP media agency Mindshare. To reach a large audience, she thinks of Verizon Media. To align with certain categories of “trusted content,” she thinks of Yahoo.

Though Yahoo has a large audience and a “sea of content,” advertisers struggled to target the content that people were either searching for or engaging with on Yahoo’s site, according to Mohammad Haque, vp of paid search at IPG agency MediaHub. It “has made it hard to transfer that into performance… relative to other publishers,” he said.

Across MediaHub’s client set, Haque hasn’t seen a big shift in brands’ investment into Yahoo properties, but there has been a shift away from Yahoo’s native advertising offering over the years, though this may be due to a decline in the popularity of native advertising in media plans “due [to] questions around brand safety and also downstream performance,” he said.

Yahoo’s native advertising product Gemini — now a part of the Verizon Media Native offering and expanded across the media group’s properties — performed well in the past for some advertisers who now invest heavily across Verizon Media’s verticals, said Ben Dutter, director of media planning and strategy at 3Q Digital. However, Yahoo is “viewed less positively as a standalone publisher, since many of its users are either less tech-savvy or affluent,” he said. Yahoo is often used as an entry point to the web, Dutter added, and the content syndicated on Yahoo from other sites receives less engagement from audiences compared to other publications.

In the fourth quarter of 2020, Verizon Media’s total revenue increased by 11% year over year to $2.3 billion, the first quarter of year-over-year growth since it acquired Yahoo in 2017 for $4.5 billion. The company does not disclose its advertising revenue or break out Yahoo’s revenue, but it did report that its demand-side platform’s revenue increased by 41% year over year.

Despite the downturn of Yahoo’s standing in advertisers’ consideration sets, the website’s redesign could turn around its prospects if it pushes people to become more active on Yahoo and provide the company with more information to inform advertisers’ campaigns. “Yahoo is a content gold mine, which from an advertising standpoint may be going only partially tapped at this point,” Haque said.

Nearly every piece of Yahoo will be part of a moveable dashboard, letting users create their own unique page based on their interests, according to the company. Modules featuring different topics like news, email, shopping, bills, to-do lists, sports teams and stocks let users build out the page to curate content and tools to personalize the way the Yahoo website looks. The moveable dashboard will start out on the Yahoo homepage and Yahoo Mail, and the redesign will be applied to more Yahoo pages over time, according to a Yahoo spokesperson.

The more personalized the content that is put in front of people, the more time they are likely to spend on a website, Haque said. If these changes to Yahoo “creates greater engagement down funnel, that’s where we will put our dollars ultimately in,” he said.

Dutter echoed this sentiment: If people’s activity on Yahoo increases, this could “warrant reconsidering Yahoo as part of our reach or engagement programs.”

Ad tech, of course, is riddled with made-up terminology. Not this time. Deterministic and probabilistic methods for making identifiable data connections have been around for years and in relation to a variety of subject areas that have absolutely nothing to do with digital advertising —from public health to education to risk analysis.

Better yet: the words actually reflect their meaning. (Even better yet — no acronyms!)

What is deterministic data?
Deterministic data is information that is known to be true and accurate because it is supplied by people directly or is personally identifiable, such as names or email addresses. It’s often referred to as authenticated data.

What is probabilistic data?
Probabilistic data is based on probabilities. It is comprised of individual pieces of information, such as a device’s operating system or IP address, and compiled to puzzle together a conclusion. In the case of ad tech, probabilistic data can be used to create an identifier.

How is deterministic data used for advertising identity?
Deterministic identifiers use deterministic data to assign identity to a person online or using a mobile device in order to track that identified person across websites or apps for ad targeting or measurement. The key ingredient in deterministic identity is typically information someone supplied herself, usually by logging in with a name, email address or phone number.

So, is deterministic data the same as first-party data?
Well, sometimes. First-party data gathered directly from people by a brand or publisher includes deterministic data such as names, emails or phone numbers. But first-party data also includes a variety of other information reflecting actions taken on a website, articles read, purchase transactions or other behavioral data.

So how is deterministic data used to assign identity?
Deterministic identity is achieved when an email address supplied by a publisher or advertiser is matched to the same email address in an identity graph or database of logged-in users. Or, a deterministic ID match could happen if two entities both recognize an ID and can accurately match them. Sometimes three pieces of deterministic information can be used to connect the dots. For example, if it’s known that ID1234 is johndoe@johndoe.com and johndoe@johndoe.com is ID6789, then ID1234 is a deterministic match to ID6789. Ultimately, to achieve a deterministic match, data fields must agree.

So what’s probabilistic data, and how is it used for advertising?

First, a bit on why probabilistic data is used. Deterministic data is hard to come by. Very often ad tech systems can’t match identities because someone is not logged in or an email address or other piece of deterministic data is not available. When advertisers complain about low match rates, it’s because there is a lack of deterministic data links.

Systems using probabilistic methods employ a variety of data points to decipher who a user might be. The easiest way to think about these methods is that they assign identity that is probably accurate. Basically, they’re taking their best guess to infer identity.

When publishers want to assign identity to someone who is not logged in, or a demand-side platform or identity graph provider wants to figure out if there’s a match between a site visitor and another existing ID, they employ probabilistic methods to assign identity based on a variety of probabilistic data points.

Do companies communicate whether an identity has been assigned based on deterministic or probabilistic data?
While identity tech firms provide information about how they create or link IDs in technical documentation and materials provided to clients, their IDs themselves don’t reveal whether deterministic or probabilistic methods are used. In fact, some firms take a hybrid approach to creating or matching identifiers.

What types of information is used to assign probabilistic identity?
Some identity tech firms call the information used to piece together probabilistic identity “soft signals” or “non-unique device characteristics.” Typical data points used include IP address, timestamps, browser version or screen resolution.

Um, isn’t this just fingerprinting?
Fingerprinting also triangulates a variety of data points to establish identity, but ad and identity tech execs often stress that there are distinctions between the two. They’re particularly compelled to draw distinctions because the practice of fingerprinting has fallen out of favor, especially since 2019 when Google said its Chrome browser would restrict its use and since the company prohibits ad tech vendor partners from using fingerprinting for identification. Other browsers like Safari and Firefox also restrict fingerprinting.

Companies employing probabilistic identification methods give varying reasons for why their techniques are distinct from fingerprinting. But the distinctions can seem convoluted or semantic.

For example, some identity tech firms argue that fingerprinting usually happens mainly on the advertiser side, when advertisers or ad tech firms want to create persistent identifiers without the knowledge or approval of people or publishers. Others, however, say fingerprinting happens on the publisher side, when publishers want to create IDs. Others suggest the distinction lies in that fingerprinting happens only at the device-level.

“It’s just in the language and that makes me furious,” one ad tech exec who spoke anonymously told Digiday. “Most ad tech companies, most identity solutions, the probabilistic IDs, these are based on fingerprinting technology — but they’re not calling it fingerprinting.”