Overview
Piano First Party Data Acquisition (FPDA) refers to a set of features that, together, address the deprecation of third party cookies announced separately by Apple, Mozilla, and Google. FPDA does not refer to a single product or license, but instead is used to reference the features across existing Piano products that solve this problem.
Piano views these upcoming changes as fundamentally beneficial for both clients and consumers. The previous reliance on 3rd party data and audience exchanges was never perfectly reliable and was not conducive toward building positive relationships between publishers and consumers. This new era will necessitate and facilitate stronger loyalty and engagement, with authentic user data and consent driving this process.
Piano’s FPDA solution lies at the intersection of three products: Composer, ID, and Audience. Piano has established connections between these three products that allow collection and activation of first party data. The details of this solution are provided in sections below.
Our Solution
As mentioned, Piano FPDA consists of a set of features, some of which are pre-existing in the Piano platform and others that have been introduced in response to these challenges. This section aims to provide more details on the existing and upcoming features that will enable continued audience activation in the post-3rd-party-cookie era.
Identity
Programmatic advertising has worked historically by way of cookie syncs which match your 1st party cookie with 3rd party cookies provided by ad tech platforms. With this process in jeopardy, the new method of identifying users will be authentication, specifically through use of email addresses. Instead of relying on cookies, you will be able to coordinate with your preferred vendors by mutual identification of known users.
Naturally, sharing PII such as email address is not permitted under GDPR and we expect that trend will grow to include US law as well. Instead, we will support activation of audience using Univeral ID solutions, such as ID5.
These solutions will translate the user’s email address (obtained when the user registers or signs up for a newsletter) into an encrypted ID that cannot be reverse engineered. This ID can be shared with vendors, who will be able to recognize that ID for future targeting. For non-RTB programmatic sales, the use of these IDs is crucial in maintaining today’s status quo.
What you need to do
Clients using Identity Management or Piano Identity Linking will have access to these providers without needing to implement any changes to code. Piano will automatically translate the users’ email addresses to these Universal IDs and will include them in inventory syncs to ad tech vendors. It is important that you gather consent from users that their email address can be used in this way, preferably via the TCF2.0 Consent String.
Piano will read these consents before retrieving the Universal ID. We will also ensure that IDs are kept up to date and appropriately conveyed to our ad tech partners.
If you are not using Identity Management or Identity Linking, you can work with a Universal ID provider yourself and retrieve the relevant IDs, and pass them to Piano. Please be sure that they are up-to-date and that Piano has access to your credentials so that we can broadcast those IDs to other platforms. Note that this process is challenging because it requires that you constantly check whether a user’s ID is up-to-date and pass those IDs on to Piano.
At the root of all of this is, of course, the user’s identity. The more you build your identified audience now, the more effective you will be in activating audience when 3rd party cookies are deprecated. Because this ecosystem is built on identification, it is never too early to start gathering more registered users. Tips on how to do this effectively are provided in sections below.
Gathering data
Historically, 3rd party data has been collected by way of these cookie syncs as well, or by way of sharing PII. While this process can continue through the use of Universal IDs, we encourage you to at least supplement that data with your own First Party Data. Piano automatically collects a high degree of behavioral data based on your users’ browsing habits, device information, and other pageview metadata. However, this is all ‘indirect’ data – data that users do not consciously provide. Therefore, there are of course characteristics about your audience that cannot be inferred from this information alone.
We highly recommend using Identity Management Custom fields to collect first party data. Piano has introduced a connection between ID/Identity Linking and Audience, allowing the data collected in Custom Fields to be available for segmentation in Audience. We have provided some out-of-the-box sociodemographic custom fields questions such as age and gender, which we encourage you to collect from your users. However, this feature is not limited only to those predefined fields. We highly recommend that you create Custom fields based on the specific information that you believe is most relevant to your audience and the advertising partners you work with. We only advise that under no circumstances should PII be collected and shared with the Audience, including email address, phone number, physical address, and name. For each Custom field, you can select whether you would like to make that data available for segmentation.
What you need to do
Again, there is little technical work required if Identity Management/Identity Linking is already implemented. Simply leverage Piano’s Custom fields functionality to define those data you would like to collect, and begin collecting this information. You can choose when and how you would like to collect data from your users. Perhaps you will ask information from them upon registration, or you will use Composer’s Show form card to display progressive profiling questions to users throughout their journey. We provide tips on methods of collecting data in sections below.
Best practices
Collecting identity
Users are generally not incentivized to provide their email address when asked. We typically see that roughly 5% of users choose to register. In many ways, this is likely to change organically as the internet shifts toward more identity-based relationships – users will feel more comfortable providing their email address as it becomes the norm. However, there are opportunities to increase your identified audience in addition to this natural lift we will see over time.
Registration terms
The most simplistic method of collecting identity is to exchange temporary site access without paywalls to users for their registration. Users will have an immediate value exchange, so this can be an effective strategy for getting your foot in the door, primarily on content pages (as opposed to a landing page).
We highly recommend coupling this functionality with Passwordless registration. This will allow the user to create their account with minimal friction, so they are less likely to abandon the registration process. We have found that Passwordless registration is particularly effective when gathering identity from users on mobile.
Newsletter signup
Again through the use of Passwordless registration, you can couple a Newsletter signup with account creation. When collecting user email address for your newsletter, you can also make a call to Piano’s API to log a passwordless registration. Please note that this requires the knowledge and consent of your users, so be certain that they are informed of this action as part of the signup process.
Sweepstakes
If it is accessible to you, we also find that users are more likely to provide their email address if they are entered into a contest to win some prize. By creating a campaign in which you encourage signup for a chance to win, you can gather high volume of registrations.
Gathering first party data
Gathering data can be challenging. Users are similarly not incentivized to provide information, especially if they view it is not relevant to their experience on site. For this reason, we recommend limiting the quantity of data you request from a user at once, and be as unobtrusive as possible when requesting information.
Gathering data on registration
If you do not use Passwordless registration, this can be an opportunity to gather some quick data as part of the user’s signup process. Especially if the user is converting on a registration term or entering a sweepstakes, they will be more likely to provide additional information as part of that value exchange.
If you are collecting registration outside of these means (e.g. if a user is signing up for a newsletter or has otherwise chosen to register), we do not recommend displaying Custom fields to these users as it may deter them from completing the signup process.
Progressive profiling
Through the use of Composer’s Show form card, you can choose to display Custom forms to users at intervals throughout their journey. That could be organized such that the user is asked for more information after a set number of pageviews. Or you could target users with high levels of engagement and present forms to them. In either case, we discourage the use of lengthy forms, and instead recommend that you limit the number of questions asked to users at any given time.
We also suggest that you display these forms inline, or at minimum via a dismissable modal. Users will have an unpleasant experience if they are unable to browse non-paywalled content without providing information.
Sweepstakes
Similar to identity, you could organize a campaign where users can provide responses to Custom fields in exchange for the opportunity to win some contest. In these cases, you will be able to conduct more formal surveys with a higher number of questions, but to ensure high volume of responses, we do recommend that this be of reasonable length.