Start.io just boosted its average daily revenue; here’s how 

Start.io’s primary mission is to help mobile app developers earn the most money possible from the ads they run inside their apps. This month, we made a breakthrough in this effort, achieving 9.8 percent higher advertising fill rates and 12 percent higher daily revenue through our new partnership with Intent IQ. 

Here’s how. 

Every time Start.io needs to display an ad, it attaches (where allowed) the consumer’s mobile advertising ID, or MAID. MAIDs are a 32-character, anonymous and resettable alphanumeric identifier that gets attached to every mobile device.  

For example, here’s what a sample MAID looks like: 34868ee1-3299-465e-a776-4fe0abd869c6 

Adtech companies attach consumer demographic information to MAIDs, like the consumer’s general location, their interests, estimated income, and other factors, based on what companies can observe (or guess) about the consumer’s profile. 

When we send an ad request that includes a MAID, advertisers compete with one another to show an ad to that person, based on the demographic information attached to their MAID. 

For example, car companies pay high CPMs to show ads to people actively shopping for their next car. On the flip side, a large potato chip company might pay low CPMs to reach everyone in America as part of a general brand awareness campaign. 

MAIDs have some limitations. For one, consumers can reset their MAID, or choose not to share their MAID with advertisers. Google and Apple can (and have) restricted the industry’s ability to use MAIDs for ad targeting. Regulators worldwide have signaled that they could enact new rules around how companies use industry-standard advertising identifiers like MAIDs and their browser equivalent, third-party cookies. 

Enter alternative advertising IDs. 

These IDs work like MAIDs and serve as a repository for companies to organize consumer demographic and behavioral information. Intent IQ’s identity resolution platform helps companies like Start.io match MAIDs with one or more corresponding alternative IDs. Intent IQ maintains its own alternative ID, IIQ ID, and helps companies match MAIDs with other third-party alternative IDs. 

With Intent IQ, we’re now able to send more information along with our advertising requests—ideally, both a MAID and one or more of the MAID’s corresponding alternative IDs. 

In our tests, we used Intent IQ’s platform to match MAIDs with their corresponding alternative IDs. We then sent out millions of real-world ad requests and compared the performance of enhanced ad requests (containing multiple advertising identifiers), with a control group (containing only MAIDs). 

In an industry as hyper-optimized as ours, winning 12 percent higher daily revenue is a major win. Start.io delivers hundreds of millions of ads per day to more than 500,000 active mobile apps, so the impact of this test is both immediate and global.  

We’re now in the process of introducing enhanced ads to all our demand partners. 

Alternative IDs help the programmatic advertising ecosystem deliver ads that are better tailored to a consumer’s individual interests. 

Everyone wins: Consumers get privacy-friendly ads that are better targeted to their interests, brands get their message in front of potential customers, and publishers get higher CPMs for their advertising inventory.