Ummm What is a Mobile Advertising ID?
You might have heard the word mobile Ad IDs floating around a lot in digital advertising spaces recently. And, as our readers are certainly aware of by now, PredictWise audiences are keyed to MAIDs, allowing us to achieve better match rates. In fact, PredictWise is tracking 250 political, psychographic, electoral, and economic metrics tied to more than 250 MM MAIDs, updating weekly. Mobile Ad IDs have been called by many names: device IDs, MAIDs, unique device IDs, and mobile identifiers, to name a few, but what is it? Simply put MAIDs are identifiers helping advertisers understand whether a user of a particular phone has taken an action like a click or an app install. Below are a few simple tips to help you understand them better:
What is a mobile ad ID?
MAIDs (Mobile Advertisement Identifiers) are a sequence of random numbers, letters, and symbols that are shared with various app servers the user has on their phone to track their user’s journey and “remember” their choices. The two most important and widely used MAIDs are attributed to phones at the software level by Apple (IDFA) & Android (AAID).
Does everyone have a MAID?
Most popular phone manufacturers, phones running on Apple & Android, for example, have MAIDs in their operating systems.
Does the MAID tied to a user last forever?
MAIDs do get refreshed, either by the phone manufacturers operating system, by the user manually, or with the replacement of a new device. A user can also manually reset one’s device ID on their phone, whenever they want and also see what applications are currently using their device ID. This is why it is important for advertisers to not continually use the same audience ID list & keeping your lists updated, although the average life-span of the MAID is about 630 times longer than the average cookie.
Why are MAIDs important?
As I mentioned earlier, MAIDs help identify and track mobile users. This helps advertisers to ingest certain user behavior, which can be aggregated to identify trends. Tracking MAID data allows advertisers to better understand how users interact with their ads or app on a unique device level, helping campaigns find out who might be exposed to a particular ad, who clicked it, and who installed the app, allowing for a better understanding of conversion and ROI. MAIDs help campaign managers serve their ads to a more precise audience network, creating an increased custom ad environment for the users and improving the advertising experience for every unique user overall.
How Does PredictWise use MAIDs to help our clients run better ad campaigns?
PredictWise provides completely tailored MAID-level audiences to supply your campaign with a maximum targeting advantage. PredictWise custom targeting solutions are built on ID Resolution Tech, finding people where they are, regardless of whether that is mobile, online, or home, meaning we hit our targets with the highest likelihood possible.
The Future of MAIDS
With the digital ad industry keeping aware of the latest updates with the downfall of cookies and their future availability, most industry professionals are focusing their attention on MAIDs. As of now MAIDs are replacing the third party cookie as a more reliable user ad tracker and a form of user measurement, as the space shifts we might see things shift more toward mobile fingerprinting, device fingerprinting or SKAdNetwork frameworks but for now, it looks like MAIDs are here to stay.
Extra Reading:
https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/6274238?hl=en
https://www.facebook.com/business/help/570474483033581
https://adint.cs.washington.edu/ADINT.pdf
https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Mobile-Identity-Guide-for-Marketers-Overview.pdf
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~shmat/shmat_ndss16.pdf