How can Digital Publishers Build a Unified User Identity?

Modern publishers have to constantly engage users with short attention spans and changing privacy preferences. What’s more, they have to regularly attract and retain brands and advertisers to maximize ad revenue. Granular user data becomes a prerequisite to build a loyal user base and create diversified monetization strategies.

Collecting, analyzing, and deriving actionable insights from user data requires close coordination with the entire mar-tech ecosystem, especially when trying to build user identity and intel outside of the walled gardens owned by the digital giants.

The user identity challenge of modern-day publishers

Modern publishers have two key concerns- 

• How to personalize content and user experience for each user
• How to provide actionable intelligence to advertisers for maximum RoI

Understanding every unique visitor is a key step to achieve both these objectives, but it is easier said than done! 

So what makes it so difficult for publishers to know users along the engagement lifecycle and deliver value to advertisers across the value chain? Well, a majority of publishers run multiple domains and their typical users consume content across several digital properties. As these visits are not always through a user log in, it becomes a challenge to see each user as a single person and comprehend her preferences, choices, and interests along her consumption journey. 

The recent steps taken by major browsers such as Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome to block third-party cookies have only made it more difficult for publishers to understand users. In the absence of third-party cookies, building user identity for unique visitors will get tougher than ever. 

As fierce competition in the industry grows, publishers are increasingly adopting new strategies such as building in-house customer data platforms backed by first-party and third-party data intelligence. Regardless of the scale of a publisher, the need to create unified user identity and thoroughly understand user expectations across categories that intrigue advertisers is continuously surging.

How can publishers solve for user identity?  

The first step towards offering personalization and value is to identify unique visitors across digital domains accessed via different browsers. Such a unified view of the visitor enables publishers to effectively manage segmentation, audience engagement, and offline attribution. 

First-party data has been a great source of intelligence to publishers as it is privacy-compliant information willingly shared by the visitors. In the current scenario, it is emerging as a valuable asset and one of the few sources of authentic user information for publishers. 

Effective first-party data management requires adequate mechanisms to recognize visitors across domains. Creating a scalable unique ID for every visitor, therefore, becomes a crucial first step towards harnessing first-party data for personalization and inventory optimization.

Azira’s solution to build unified user identity

The Azira Platform facilitates publishers to identify and unify the visitors across their digital properties with Azira’s Unified ID Solution. The Azira ID is one of the most persistent digital IDs out there with home location and other hashed identifiers attached along with device IDs and cookies. 

Azira operates at a scale which enable publishers to match and enhance their visitors’ anonymized identifiers with rich real-world signals such as brand affinity, home location, CRM data et.al. These enriched IDs can be pushed back to publishers’ platforms of choice through APIs for further engagement and insights generation.

Once unique visitors are identified across sites, publishers can leverage enriched data to create data stories. This actionable intelligence can then be utilized for developing consumer insights, personalization, sales planning, product development, and marketing. Azira enabled one of the largest publishers to build a unique user identity and get a 360-degree view into its consumers’ interests and lifestyles through its data enrichment platform, CARBON.