NextRoll’s Privacy Sandbox testing reimagines cookieless bidding & optimization models
At a glance
- To help advertisers prepare for a privacy-first future, NextRoll built Protected Audience integrations that reimagined its core bidding and optimization models. NextRoll engineers then ran system tests to determine whether advertisers could serve remarketing and custom audience campaigns with the Privacy Sandbox APIs.
- NextRoll’s RollWorks business saw an opportunity to use Protected Audience API to create customer audience segments to meet the needs of B2B advertiser campaigns, becoming the first account-based marketing (ABM) platform to test the Privacy Sandbox publicly.
- After investing heavily in Protected Audience integrations and rebuilding the ML models that support its bidding system, NextRoll was able to successfully serve ads at volume and solve for remarketing and other first-party custom audience use cases.
NextRoll prepares the advertising ecosystem for privacy-forward remarketing
Over the last four years, NextRoll has been active in public discussions shaping the future of the Privacy Sandbox technologies. Its engineering team developed new approaches to early Privacy Sandbox proposals that informed the direction for the Protected Audience API, and NextRoll continues to provide early testing insights to Chrome and the broader ecosystem.
NextRoll’s testing systems helped its subsidiaries RollWorks, an ABM platform for B2B advertisers, and AdRoll, a DSP that serves B2C mid-sized businesses, understand the Privacy Sandbox APIs’ impact on their customers’ campaigns. RollWorks was also the only ABM company represented during early Privacy Sandbox discussions within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and became the first ABM platform to test the Privacy Sandbox APIs publicly.
“NextRoll has taken a different approach. We've built a brand new, privacy-forward DSP/RTB engine from the ground up. This has allowed us to demonstrate how Privacy Sandbox works not just for existing use cases, such as remarketing, but also to begin exploring new modes of privacy-protecting first-party data activation. We're excited for the next era of online privacy and are actively working to usher it in, with new technologies and marketing approaches.”
Testing the technology
NextRoll invested heavily in building sophisticated Protected Audience integrations. Its solutions refactored core bidding, optimization, segmentation, and ad-serving technology, plus ran system tests to gauge Protected Audience’s ability to serve remarketing and custom audiences. NextRoll enabled the tests for its advertisers and capped the budget at 1% of ad spend, allowing for high-level directional insights without impacting individual advertiser campaign performance.
To integrate Protected Audience and effectively serve advertisers of all sizes, NextRoll completely rebuilt the custom machine learning systems that support its bidder, BidIQ. This new bidding system treats Privacy Sandbox technologies as the primary method for delivering ads with privacy in mind.
The results
With these new systems, NextRoll served ads across more than 20,000 campaigns, solved for remarketing and custom audience use cases, and identified opportunities to fine-tune the technology and further improve performance. NextRoll’s early results demonstrated that private advertising is possible with the Privacy Sandbox APIs despite lower-than-expected publisher participation rates impacting available ad inventory and, ultimately, campaign performance. Now that NextRoll has concluded its systems tests, it plans to ramp up for a wider performance test and continues to share its findings with Chrome and the advertising ecosystem. As the Privacy Sandbox evolves, NextRoll is committed to expanding adoption with more supply partners and will continue to share results with the ecosystem.
