Marketing has always been about bringing forth the best brand experience for users and consumers. But the question is, “How to effectively deliver ads to the right audience?” And the answer lies in the concept of Universal Identity. In today’s internet governed world, Data is king, especially in digital marketing and advertising.

Since its inception in 1994, cookies have been a great way for industry experts like advertisers, content developers, and publishers to capture and monitor user information and customer identification for marketing purposes. However, after 26 years of their existence, cookies are now slowly going out of fashion. 

With internet users everywhere, smart gadgets are now a fundamental part of your life. More and more internet usage now occurs in devices where cookies are largely irrelevant. Thus, most tech giants, including Apple, Firefox, and Google, have all started to limit the use of 3rd-party cookies on their web browsers.

Solution after the Cookie-era 

Now that cookies are moving away, tech giants like Google and Microsoft have started to limit cookies in their browsers. The industry needs a better alternative that can work through all digital platforms, better communicates its relevance to customers and gives them more control over their data. 

The solution to the problem comes with a Universal Identity.

Universal ID is a single identifier used to identify users and their identities across multiple platforms. This eliminates the need to sync user identity information using 3rd-party software, allowing marketers and ad-tech experts to target their advertisements to the right audience better. 

Universal IDs can be created using 1st-party cookies from offline sources, for instance, customer management software database (CMS).

Significance of Universal ID for Publishers

Universal ID’s arrival can be a blessing for web publishers. This is because cookie syncing with multiple partners is a faulty system with numerous privacy, speed, and efficiency issues. 

Following are some of the advantages of using Universal ID.

• Immunity against Blocked Cookies: If users are detected and monitored by defining a deterministic match through universal ID, publishers no longer need to depend on 3rd-party cookies, so it doesn’t matter if browsers block them.

• Improved Device Compatibility: Unlike cookies, universal IDs operate across various platforms, including desktop, tablet, and smartphone. Some service providers even make commitments of providing 100% accuracy while matching the user’s identity.

• Higher Profits: Higher user matching rates indicate advertisers will identify a user with better accuracy, resulting in improved sales opportunities. In general, the more confident an advertiser is about a particular user’s identity, the higher their bid is likely to be. This, in turn, can help a publisher to earn higher revenue through website ads.

• Better User Experience: In its current state, cookie-syncing necessitates multiple partner callouts to maximize match rate, which increases page latency. This results in higher loading time and slow websites. Universal ID eliminates the use of these cookies enabling the developer to provide a better user experience.

Final Tip for a Cookie-less Future

Although the list of benefits for the Universal ID is long and growing, none is more convincing than the impending demise of the current cookie-based framework.

In the best-case scenario, using cookies will harm your search engine rankings. However, the more plausible (and potentially more damaging) scenario is that your site will cease to function and become outdated as web browsers will no longer be supporting cookies.

When this happens, Universal IDs will help in audience segmentation and become a backbone for targeted advertising.