The State of Digital Identity Report 2022

ID5 has released its 2022 State of Digital Identity Report, providing a comprehensive analysis of the developments made by publishers, advertisers, and ad tech platforms when it comes to the evaluation and adoption of alternative identity resolutions. 

We found brands around the world are missing out on reaching cookieless audiences, with 87% of respondents identifying as such, and are restricted to competing for the same, limited portion of consumers reachable via cookies. Of those surveyed, 69% of advertisers want to be able to reach cookieless audiences today.

This latest report looks closely at a number of elements that shed light on how businesses are preparing to navigate a cookieless future going into 2023. The findings present insights into testing success rates, the most favoured alternative solutions, time frames in which players expect to have their cookieless strategies in place, and more.

By surveying 164 respondents globally, the report found that first-party universal identifiers are believed to be the most viable and scalable solution to replace third-party cookies, with 38% of respondents identifying them as the primary alternative. A mixture of deterministic and probabilistic first-party IDs take the top spot (54%) for the best methodology alternative to generate and reconcile IDs across websites. 

“Between cookieless browsers and people refusing third-party cookies, 50% of the global traffic is already unaddressable with traditional identifiers,” said Mathieu Roche, CEO & Co-founder of ID5. “Advertisers want alternative IDs now to enable addressability at scale, maximising the opportunity that cookieless browsers offer today.”

The State of Digital Identity report found that the adoption of alternative identity solutions is on the rise industry-wide with 63% of respondents having at least one solution or more. Of those that have not adopted a solution yet, 57% stated that their unfamiliarity with the various cookieless alternatives in the market is what holds them back. Nevertheless, 50% of survey respondents have already run tests to measure the effectiveness of these solutions, and another 35% are currently testing or are in the planning stages of doing so. With more education and knowledge sharing on the benefits of taking action on cookieless, these numbers will continue to rise. 

Overall, the report found that 75% of respondents are satisfied with testing. The research indicates that, though many advertisers are behind on testing, those who have are pleased with the results and are effectively positioning themselves for the future.

“With this report, we not only wanted to highlight where companies are today, but we wanted to better understand what the industry is doing to support advertisers and publishers, as well as what challenges they are facing or are anticipating to face.” added Roche. “This success in testing across the industry provides hope that we are coming close to determining the solutions that have proven themselves as industry standards.”

Download the report here.