Online ad exchanges cost three times more for cookie-based ads that have access to data about other Web sites that consumers have visited, according to a new study.
The report, from the Digital Advertising Alliance, indicates that advertisers pay three times more per impression for cookie-driven ads, and seven times more if the cookie is 90-days old.
The average CPM for all ads examined, those served with and without cookies, was 29 cents for the company with the shorter-lived cookies, and 47 cents for the company with cookies an average of seven weeks old.
The study only examined rates for ads sold by exchanges; it didn’t look at how those rates compare to ones for ads sold directly by publishers.
Navigant conducted the study by analyzing the value of ads sold on two online ad exchanges with automated bidding.
“The results of our econometric analysis corroborate and extend an emerging body of empirical work documenting the value of information sharing in online advertising,” authors Howard Beales of George Washington University and Jeff Eisenach of Navigant Economics write in a study commissioned by the trade group Digital Advertising Alliance. “Our estimates indicate that advertisers place significantly greater value on users for whom more information is available.”
For the study, the researchers examined 3 million transactions conducted by two companies that run ad exchanges.
“There hasn’t been a lot out there about the benefits of interest-based advertising and what it has delivered to the Internet. This shows interest-based advertising is the workhorse for subsidizing content on the Internet,” said Lou Mastria, managing director of the DAA, which plans to share the results of the study with policymakers in Washington.
Source: Digital Advertising Alliance