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LiveRamp’s ATS Drives More Than 340% ROI for Marketers and Adoption is Soaring

  • Travis Clinger
  • 5 min read

Marketers and publishers have embraced LiveRamp’s Authenticated Traffic Solution (ATS) as the post-cookie solution of choice. To date, hundreds of publishers, brands, and platforms across the globe, including the U.S., UK, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Australia, and Japan, have adopted ATS. Enabling hundreds of brand advertising campaigns already in the first quarter of 2021 alone, ATS has powered a people-based approach to creating addressable audiences across all channels, making consumer interactions relevant and measurable. As brands pivoted quickly during the last year, they turned to us to activate audiences within technology platforms and publishers to reach real people—not cookies or device IDs.

ATS results are in: better performance across key KPIs

A new Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study, commissioned by LiveRamp, found advertisers who use LiveRamp’s solution in place of third-party cookies can achieve 343% ROI over three years, with payback within only six months of initial investment.
Worldwide, over 100 brands across verticals have already recognised this urgency, embracing ATS as a durable and valuable solution for seamless activationmeasurement, and attribution across display, mobile in-app, connected TV, and OTT. Compared to campaigns using third-party cookies, marketers saw significant improvement with LiveRamp, including:

  • 403% increase in travel bookings for a leading international hotel chain
  • 85% – 95% video completion rate (VCR) for a leading social health nonprofit
  • 84.3% average increase in sustained return on ad spend (ROAS) from multiple brands over the last year

At a time when first-party data is more important than ever, this proven, viable solution ensures the open web can compete on a level playing field with walled gardens across any channel or platform.

Widespread publisher adoption: a commitment to authentication

Over 400 publishers have signed on or implemented ATS to offer marketers a more efficient way to reach their customers and measure campaign outcomes without third-party cookies or device identifiers. Currently, 70% of the Comscore 20 and 65% of the Comscore 50 are working with ATS to enable people-based inventory and improve monetisation, including Microsoft Advertising, the world’s second-largest publisher, who has seen a larger than 40% increase in CPMs on authenticated impressions in initial tests. Other notable publishers who have adopted ATS include Asahi, Burda Community Network, CafeMedia, Dennis Publishing, eBay Classifieds Group UK, Gumtree, IDG, OpenWeb, Planet Media, Prisma, Publift, Realtor.com, Seven West Media, Tubi, and Cricket Australia, the first in-app publisher signed.

ATS is designed to stand the test of time, conscious of current and future privacy regulation and ensuring a value exchange with increased transparency. It’s indisputable that authentications, even at 30%, translate into higher-value inventory and better data. Campaigns run better on ATS today, can increase reach on Safari, Firefox, and Edge, and ensure marketers are set up for future success. Additionally, those who adopt an authentication strategy now will gain a significant competitive advantage in replacing mobile IDs, cookies, and other problematic identifiers that do not prioritise consumer privacy.

Garnering widespread platform support since its entry into the marketplace, LiveRamp is live with all major global demand-side and supply-side platforms, including Amobee, Beeswax, Criteo, fluct, Index Exchange, InMobi, Magnite, MediaMath, Nativo, OpenX, PubMatic, Roku, Supership, The Trade Desk, and Yieldlab. LiveRamp’s neutral and interoperable solution gives both marketers and publishers choice and control in terms of how they want to buy and measure media and connect their data across the open internet.

“The digital industry is undergoing massive shifts with the end of third-party cookies and mobile device identifiers. We set out to create the neutral and interoperable infrastructure for this new era, and the incredible, worldwide adoption of ATS proves we’ve done just that,” said LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe. “Simply put, ATS places publishers and marketers in control of their data. It generates better results for marketers, higher yields for publishers, and gives consumers greater transparency. Over 100 brands have tested ATS, including clients through agency partnerships, and we expect this number only to grow.”

Here’s how several of our customers have taken control of their cookieless future using LiveRamp, and the results they’ve seen:

“Even before the phasing out of third-party cookies, we have been leveraging alternative identifiers to deliver more relevant marketing and improve marketing outcomes, especially in online video campaigns as consumers increase time spent with video,” said Manuel Cimarosti, Director of Media Analytics & Data Strategy at Danone. “In the first test alone, ATS delivered a 4% increase in video completion rate on top of 40% more efficient cost metrics when compared to the cookie. These results are invaluable as we continue growing our first-party relationship with consumers across more touch points, and reinvest the savings to increase our reach.”

“ATS has enabled us not only to prepare for a world without third-party cookies but also to excel beyond it by dramatically increasing the value of our inventory through first-party authentications,” added Yi-Fang Yen, Senior Vice President at realtor.com. “We feel closer to home shoppers than ever, enhancing our ability to make the most of their home-buying journey through more compelling and personalised experiences.”

“TV viewers are now well-integrated into streaming environments, which are fragmented across a wide variety of device platforms for advertisers. This makes the marketer’s challenge of reaching and measuring a target audience multi-dimensional, and having a people-based identifier is important to ensure that advertising campaigns are relevant across channels and devices,” added Mark Rotblat, Chief Revenue Officer at Tubi. “LiveRamp helps enable authenticated, first-party relationships with our viewers so we can continue to deliver impactful experiences at scale.”

“Together with LiveRamp, we are putting power back in the hands of publishers,” said Paul Bannister, CSO of CafeMedia. “We’re enabling our thousands of media brands to grow revenue by activating first-party data in a safe and privacy-centric manner without having to worry about data leakage, particularly because of LiveRamp’s privacy-enhancing technology. Already, we’re seeing authenticated audiences generate much higher yields than when using third-party cookies.”

“Our industry has reached a crossroads where we can move forward with a transparent, privacy-conscious approach to user authentication, or risk the same faults we saw with the cookie,” said Liane Nadeau, SVP and Head of Precision Media and Investments at Digitas North America. “Our advice to clients is to take advantage of the time left before third-party cookies leave the ecosystem, and test and invest in authenticated solutions that will maintain consumer trust moving forward.”

We’re recommending everyone be fully migrated off cookies by September in order to be prepared for the holiday season. We’ve put together this page to help brands and publishers put cookies and other device identifiers in the rearview mirror. Or reach out to [email protected] and learn how we can help from assessment to planning to implementation—to help you hit this deadline.