PAIR audiences

PAIR (Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation) audiences are a secure and privacy-forward way to enable advertisers and publishers to reconcile their first-party data for audiences who have visited both the advertiser’s and a publisher’s site. 

Consumers prefer relevant ads, but they don’t want them to come at the cost of their privacy. With PAIR, advertisers are able to run relevant ads against their first-party audiences, like past purchasers and people on their loyalty lists. PAIR can be used to engage with existing customers or cart-abandoners, and prevent consumers from seeing ads for a product they already purchased.

How it works

PAIR is a protocol that provides advertisers and publishers with a privacy-safe way to reconcile first-party data by encrypting each party’s first-party data three times with three different keys: an advertiser key, a publisher key and a key shared between the two parties. These keys are unique for every advertiser-publisher relationship and every participating entity has access to up to two of the keys, which means at no point within this workflow does any one party have access to all three keys. Our clean room provider partnerships across PAIR are streamlining data management, encryption key workflows, and the onboarding of PAIR datasets on an advertiser’s behalf, allowing publishers and advertisers to more quickly activate and scale across their multi-PAIR partnerships. 

After the clean room partner completes the encryption and reconciliation workflows, the advertiser and the publisher receives the match rate percentage from the respective first-party datasets brought in by each party within the relationship. No user-level matches or Personally Identifiable Information will be shared back to either party, nor will any personally identifiable information be shared with additional parties such as the supply side platform or with Display & Video 360.

Set up PAIR audiences

Work with an external data partner to identify, onboard, and prepare the data for Display & Video 360 distribution.

Link an external data partner

1. From your advertiser, go to “Advertiser settings” > “Linked accounts” > Link new account > External data partner.
2. Search for “PAIR” and choose a PAIR Data Clean Room from the available options.
3. Click Link.
4. Confirm your acceptance by checking “On behalf of my company, I agree” then Create link.

Learn more about Sharing audience lists from external data partners. 

View a PAIR audience segment

1. Navigate to Audiences > All audiences. 
2. Click the filter bar and filter on “Type”.
3. Select “PAIR” and click Apply.

Audience Summary widget

Additional information about a PAIR audience is available in the Audience Summary widget. The Audience Summary widget displays offline statistics, as provided by the clean room integration:

• Audience size:  The audience size is the total users in your first-party audience list.
• Match rate: Percent of advertiser data that was matched on publisher data within the clean room.
• Effective reach: The count of users in the first-party audience list that matches with the publisher’s audience list, calculated using match rate.

Target a PAIR audience segment

1. From your line item’s “Targeting” section, select Audience lists and expansion.
2. Click Add audience to expand.
3. Choose PAIR from the “Audience Type” dropdown.

You also have the option to use search term query bulk assignment to apply a search term filter at the top of the audiences assignment page and bulk assign, or use Structured Data Files to target PAIR audiences.

Best practices and troubleshooting

To investigate what could be limiting scale in Display & Video 360, use the Troubleshooter tab in a PAIR line item to see targeting combinations currently applied that are filtering impressions from the PAIR bid requests. 

Use the following best practices to ensure your PAIR segments perform as intended:

• Exchanges: Keep all exchanges open to targeting for PAIR.    
• Blocked sites: Remove the site list exclusions as they will potentially prohibit the PAIR line item from spending. 
• Category or URL exclusions: No category or URL exclusions should be  applied that would directly conflict with the desired publisher for testing. Additional brand safety settings can also result in bids being dropped.
• Frequency cap: Don’t apply a frequency cap at the line item level that could prohibit initial scale
• Inventory targeting: If running open auction inventory with the respective publisher, there is no need to exclusively target the specific publisher inventory source as the PAIR segment will only be compatible with the desired publisher. 
• Deals: If running a negotiated publisher deal (PMP), the deal will need to be negotiated with the publisher prior to the line item launching and targeted within the line item.
• Targeting: Exclusively target PAIR audience segments within the line item. Additional targeting will restrict scale and limit spend.

• Inclusion lists: If PAIR line items are running across open auction inventory don’t apply any filters against the public inventory sources.

Reporting

Use Instant or Offline reporting in Display & Video 360 or Campaign Manager 360 to review PAIR audience performance.

Use the following metrics for PAIR and comparison line items:

• Impressions
• Active View: Viewable Impressions
• Clicks
• Post-Click Conversions
• Post-View Conversions
• Media Cost (Advertiser Currency)
• Total Conversions
• Click Rate (CTR)
• Media Cost eCPM (Advertiser Currency)
• Media Cost eCPC (Advertiser Currency)
• Media Cost eCPA (Advertiser Currency)
• Conversions per 1000 Impressions

Reporting dimensions and filters should be aligned between PAIR and comparison line items. To ensure a significant sample size, wait 4 weeks after the start date before running a report and use at least 30 days of data.