The Death of Bad Identity: How Better ID Graphs Improve CPM Efficiency

For far to long the digital ad industry has tolerated weak identity. Building entire buying strategies around half-accurate cookies, stitched-together device graphs, resold third-party

data, and probabilistic guesswork dressed up as precision. It worked well enough in an era of cheap impressions and loose signal standards. But that era is gone.

Time have changed drastically - now (more than ever) identity quality is directly tied to media efficiency. If the underlying identity is wrong, everything downstream is wrong: the audience, the bid, the optimization, the frequency distribution, the conversion path and ultimately the CPM. Bad identity doesn’t just harm accuracy. It drives up media costs, creates waste, and breaks DSP optimization. Advertisers are often convinced they need to bid higher to reach the right user, when in reality they’re bidding into a fog of weak signals.

Bad identity is dying.

When identity is built from decayed cookies, mismatched HEM–MAID pairs, outdated linkages, or giant modeled graphs with no provenance, it expands audiences far beyond the true persona. Advertisers end up paying premium CPMs for people who never belonged in the segment. At the same time, weak identity removes the actual qualified users from the graph...forcing buyers to raise bids just to find remaining pockets of addressability. Frequency waste grows because a single user can appear as multiple profiles. Every identity failure becomes a pricing failure.

The answer isn’t “more data.”It’s better identity. Identity assembled on verified, recurring, first-party publisher signals, real human behavior. Logins, registrations, high-frequency content activity, household-level linkages are the durable signals that power a stable identity graph. And they aren’t available in the open market. They originate from the supply side.

Once identity improves, CPM efficiency follows. Better match rates reduce wasted spend. Cleaner identity eliminates duplicated impressions. More accurate behavioral signals feed DSP optimization models that finally understand who they’re bidding on. Buyers begin to win more impressions at lower prices because the underlying identity is finally trustworthy.

This is the future of addressability: clean, deterministic, publisher-verified identity at scale.