“Your addressability solution comes in a stack of various ingredients,” said Don Marti, vice president of ecosystem innovation at publisher network Raptive. “There are different addressability options that include IP address in different weights.”
These addressability solutions, from vendors like ID5 or LiveRamp, might also include signals like first-party data or hashed emails.
IP addresses are already used to plug gaps when demand-side platforms can’t hit reach goals for a campaign with cookies alone, said Keith Petri, CEO of publisher identity management platform Lockr.
Lack of precision
Once cookies fully deprecate, ad-tech systems already using IP addresses will likely target them with greater frequency as they search for signals to meet advertisers’ goals.
But advertisers shouldn’t expect performance at the level of third-party cookies. IP addresses are more likely to be linked to several individuals than a cookie, meaning that they aren’t as precise, and they are also useless if a user is using a virtual private network, said Andrew Eifler, chief product officer at supply-side platform TripleLift.
In connected TV, where the IP address is the main target option, buyers are flocking to more precise alternatives. In the third quarter of 2023, SSP Index Exchange saw the bid rate for UID 2.0-enriched traffic increase on average by over 800% from the prior quarter for streaming TV and online video, according to a spokesperson. UID 2.0 is based on first-party data.
Privacy concerns
In many ways, IP addresses are less privacy-safe than cookies.
“You can’t reset your IP address,” Eifler said. “It’s not transparent to consumers, whereas cookies are.”
Late last year, Google experimented with IP Protection, which lets users opt in to prevent third parties from tracking their IP address. Apple has systems to hide IP addresses in Safari and mail, although there are still loopholes to target by IP address on iPhones, Petit said.
If brands accentuate their use of IP addresses in a post-cookie landscape, this crackdown will surely increase, Marti said.
Reducing reliance on IP addresses will come not from finding a perfect replacement, but from investing in measurement and attribution that rely less on tying the viewer of an ad perfectly to a conversion. For instance, methods such as mixed media modeling and incrementality testing, said Artem Peplov, vp of analytics at Rain the Growth Agency.
“Hour-by-hour attribution” is not going to be a reasonable expectation in the wake of cookie deprecation, he said. “Patience is important.”
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