Seller Defined Audiences (SDA) in Short
Seller Defined Audiences (SDA) is a technical specification designed and released by the IAB Tech Lab that allows publishers to monetize their audiences without needing to use a user ID.
The specification was developed to provide a solution to the diminishing availability of third-party cookies, while offering a privacy centric alternative to ID-based identity solutions.
SDA leverages existing IAB Tech Lab standards, notably Audience Taxonomy, Content Taxonomy and IAB Tech Lab Data Transparency Standards.
To ensure rapid adoption, the SDA specification was designed to work with existing media-buying processes and standards like OpenRTB protocol and Prebid.
How Can Publishers Create Seller Defined Audiences (SDA)?
To avoid reinventing the wheel, SDA utilizes existing IAB Tech Lab standards to help publishers label their first-party data and help advertisers to recognize whether a user associated with a given SDA is a member of their target audience.
Rayn leverages SDA by supporting the standard IAB Content and Audience taxonomies asides from the custom Persona taxonomy.
The Audience Taxonomy categorizes audiences in a standardized way by assigning them to individual users. The IAB Tech Lab has defined more than 1,600 attributes within this taxonomy to help build various cohorts out of a publisher’s first-party data. Once those cohorts are big enough to anonymize, they can be dispatched in the bidstream using present objects within the OpenRTB protocol.
What Role Will IDs Play in Creating Seller-Defined Audiences?
Rayn assigns user ids to collect user behaviour and assign cohorts. The Rayn user id should not be propagated down stream, as SDA does not use unique user IDs. Publishers running SDA have to ensure that no user IDs are connected with SDA segments, to avoid user identification.
What Data Can Publishers Use to Create Seller-Defined Audiences?
The IAB Tech Lab Audience Taxonomy is supported by three pillars: "demographic", "purchase intent", and "interest". Rayn can derive interest and purchase intent data from user behaviour. Demographic data is derived from direct user interaction using the Rayndrop.
How Do Seller Defined Audiences Work?
The IAB Tech Lab has designed the SDA specification to work with existing media-buying processes and standards, notably the OpenRTB protocol and Prebid.
The procedure for utilising SDA is as follows:
Rayn creates user cohorts on the publisher page based on their first-party data.
Rayn passes the taxonomy IDs on page to DSPs via OpenRTB or GAM.
The DSPs examine the cohort IDs and decide whether to bid on the impression or not.
Why Were Seller Defined Audiences Created?
Project Rearc created Seller Defined Audiences to address the current privacy challenges in programmatic advertising and the declining availability of third-party cookies. Seller Defined Audiences aim to balance ad personalization with user privacy.
Publishers generally have two choices to activate their first-party data and enable advertisers to bid on it:
OpenRTB auctions: Publishers make the data available to advertisers by pushing user-level cohort IDs from an SSP to a DSP.
PMP deals: Publishers establish a private marketplace deal (PMP) whereby they pass the Deal ID from their SSP to a DSP. The Deal ID can be linked to specific audience attributes.
To conclude
The aim of Seller Defined Audiences is to provide a standardized way for publishers to define targetable audiences that buyers and buying platforms can understand and bid on.
Privacy Centricity. The technology avoids using user IDs for ad targeting. Instead, users are placed into cohorts and their identity is never revealed to the AdTech businesses.
Scale. Because of SDA's use of common taxonomies buyers can target the same cohorts across different publishers.
Easy to implement. SDA utilizes existing technologies like OpenRTB, Prebid.js, and IAB standard taxonomies. With Rayn's plug and play toolsetl, publishers will be up and running in no time.
Quality. Publishers can create valuable audiences that buyers can target without having to expose user-level data. With Rayn, SDA is a great combination of somewhat detailed targeting and privacy.