Advertising has crossed a remarkable threshold, surpassing $1 trillion in global spend in 2024, with over half of the revenue going to digital media giants Google, Meta, TikTok owner ByteDance, Amazon, and Alibaba. Yet as budgets grow, many enterprise advertisers are operating with outdated measurement approaches that leave significant value on the table. While there is an ongoing game of will-they-won’t-they about third-party cookie deprecation, an immediate opportunity exists: using identifiers, such as Unified ID 2.0 (UID 2.0), to achieve more accurate and holistic measurement than cookies ever provided.
Why rethink measurement now?
The common refrain "cookies aren't going away yet" has lulled many organizations into maintaining status quo measurement approaches. This inertia is understandable – changing frameworks could require significant effort, with many proposed solutions seeming abstract or overly complex.
But budgets are tight and ROI is under a microscope. Brand leaders need to be able to reach their audiences reliably and show the total impact of digital campaigns across all routes to market, both e-commerce and in-store. Legacy methods don’t do that.
The truth is, even without being fully phased out, cookies and other third-party identifiers are still showing degraded performance in targeting and measurement due to browser restrictions, blind spots in walled gardens, and consumer opt-out. And regardless of fidelity, cookies have never been able to connect advertising to both online activity and in-store or offsite sales – a measurement threshold that is considered “the holy grail” for advertisers.
Here’s the good news: new solutions based on authenticated identifiers can connect digital advertising to both online and offline (both offsite and in-store) sales, resulting in better ad performance, while also maintaining privacy standards. They also work across channels, from display and mobile devices to Connected TV, providing a more complete view of the customer journey.
Most importantly, these solutions are available now, allowing forward-thinking organizations to gain a competitive edge in measurement accuracy and insight depth.
Understanding authenticated identifiers: technical foundation
Authenticated identifiers represent a fundamental shift in digital advertising measurement. Unlike cookies designed to track devices and browsing behavior across the web but don’t inherently tie back to a specific person, authenticated IDs are built around actual customer relationships, such as logins or purchase histories. This opens up possibilities for greater personalization, targeting, measurement, and security across use cases. They're privacy-safe by design, giving consumers explicit control over their data usage while providing advertisers with more reliable and comprehensive measurement capabilities. Authenticated IDs are created when a customer uses PII-data, like an email address or phone number, to log in to a website or a publisher. The PII-data is hashed with a rotating salt and tokens are encrypted to obscure source data, making it privacy-safe. This is then stored as an authenticated identifier maintained by third parties like The Trade Desk. These hashed IDs are durable and can be matched across the web to serve ads and measure results.
One challenge is that most customers have more than one email address or phone number for their various log in credentials, which means each piece of different PII data will create its own authenticated identifier. Brands can address this by owning their own identity resolution process that links their customers’ personal information from across their stack, then hashing this data and sending it to partners like The Trade Desk to let the algorithms know that all these Authenticated IDs are the same person. This lets them reach their customers, serve them the right ads, and measure ad impact at a 1:1 level.
This combination of authenticated IDs with a comprehensive first-party customer profile that unifies information from across touchpoints is also the key to linking ads to an in-store purchase. Incorporating point-of-sale data into profiles that get hashed and sent to an ad partner like The Trade Desk lets you attribute in-store sales to digital campaigns while honoring privacy preferences.
Here’s how Natalie Kansteiner, Director of Data Partnerships at The Trade Desk describes the potential of this technology to benefit the advertisers adopting its use:
"At The Trade Desk, we’re seeing a growing trend among leading brands embracing Unified ID 2.0 to elevate their targeting and performance measurement capabilities. This privacy-conscious, durable identity solution enables advertisers to achieve unprecedented precision in audience engagement while staying aligned with evolving privacy standards. This shift underscores a pivotal industry transformation toward balancing data-driven advertising effectiveness with consumer trust and privacy compliance."
The power of 1:1 attribution and advanced analytics
A authenticated identifier like UID 2.0 makes 1:1 attribution possible across supported platforms. The granular view reveals performance variance within key sub-audiences that aggregate measurements may miss. For example, conversion patterns and media effectiveness can vary significantly within what appears to be a homogeneous audience segment when viewed at an aggregate level.
This insight enables more sophisticated audience segmentation and optimization. While personalization might still occur at the segment level (for now!), the underlying 1:1 data allows for more precise segment definition and performance measurement. The granular data also supports advanced analytics like:
Omni-channel sales impact, with the unique ability to bring in-store transaction data into the ROAS equation
Multi-touch attribution modeling with user-level data
Cross-channel interaction analysis
Incremental lift measurement
Closing the loop with offline measurement
For enterprise retailers, having the tools to demonstrate the connection between digital advertising and in-store sales has always been a critical challenge. Authenticated identifiers, combined with robust first-party data management, finally make reliable closed-loop measurement possible. This complete view of the customer journey – from ad exposure through to in-store purchase – provides the comprehensive measurement that enterprise advertisers have long sought.
With this fuller understanding of advertising impact comes better budgeting decisions, greater efficiency in media spend, and an enhanced ability to prove marketing ROI — for example, it’s not uncommon at all for brands adopting closed loop measurement to uncover millions of dollars in previously unmeasurable in-store revenue, which is an important part of the picture that they would otherwise miss.
Grounding this sort of closed-loop measurement in privacy-safe authenticated IDs and first-party data helps advertisers meet both regulatory standards and consumer expectations today while providing a robust, owned infrastructure to build on for future developments in privacy.
Understanding the ecosystem and future outlook
Major walled gardens like Meta, Google, Snapchat, and TikTok maintain their own measurement systems. Even if authenticated ID never goes past those walls, it should become a key component for measurement across the open web, with premium publishers, and crucially, in the rapidly growing Connected TV or Retail Media spaces.
The future of digital advertising measurement will be hybrid, combining:
Authenticated ID measurement where available
Clean room-based measurement for walled gardens
Probabilistic methods for unknown users
Privacy-preserving aggregate measurement techniques
Taking control of measurement
The shift to authenticated ID measurement represents a larger trend: the growing understanding that taking greater control of your advertising technology stack yields better results. Just as owning your first-party data and identity graph provides advantages, implementing authenticated ID measurement gives you more direct control over and confidence in your measurement approach.
The trillion-dollar scale of digital advertising demands more precise measurement than ever before. Authenticated identifiers provide that precision, along with capabilities that previous solutions couldn't deliver. For enterprise advertisers ready to move beyond the limitations of cookies, the opportunity for better measurement is already here.
Learn more about how Amperity powers the next evolution of media measurement.