Digital Transactions Authoritative, insightful and timely information for payments professionals
The closest thing to perfection in the advertising industry is to hawk specific products to an audience whose known buying habits indicate an almost sure purchase. Now, payments companies, which gather such data with each transaction, are getting more sophisticated about leveraging that information to help marketers sell their wares.
Exhibit A is PayPal Holdings Inc., which early Monday announced PayPal Ads ID, a service aimed at marketers and based on the data attached to what PayPal calls “verified commerce relationships.” Companies testing the new service include Magnite, an ad platform; PubMatic, an advertising-technology provider; Rokt, an e-commerce technology developer; and Taboola, a content-discovery platform.
The new service derives consumer information from how users browse across its network using the same accounts they rely on for purchases on either PayPal or Venmo, a PayPal payments platform. The whole process is aimed at accurate identification of the potential customer behind the browsing, according to information released by the company.
“Identity is the foundation everything else in advertising is built on,” says Mark Grether, a PayPal senior vice president and general manager for PayPal Ads, in a statement. “For too long, that foundation has been guesswork. PayPal Ads ID changes that. When your identity layer is built on verified commerce relationships, you’re no longer estimating who someone is, you’re reaching them with confidence.”
PayPal says the combination of data from both PayPal and Venmo transactions helps assure accuracy in matching ads with the right audience. With that combination of users, the new service depends on information linked to more than 25 billion transactions generated by more than 400 million users, PayPal says.
At the same time, the new service protects users’ privacy, PayPal says. Each transaction identifier is “encrypted, aggregated, and de-identified” to mask user names and other transaction details, while the service offers what PayPal calls “controls” allowing users to “manage their participation” in the service. This lets marketers gain access to what PayPal says is “commerce-grade identity” without disclosure of sensitive information.
For PayPal, the new service represents a deeper foray into ad-related commerce. In June, it launched Storefront Ads, which aims at allowing PayPal-accepting merchants to present their products to potential online customers.
