In view of the gradual shift from third-party cookies to less privacy-intrusive practices, the ID-Less Solutions Guidance by IAB Tech Lab aims to simplify digital businesses’ transition to the new era of addressability realities. Here’s its brief overview.

While Google’s decision to walk back from the global deprecation of third-party cookies has been mostly perceived positively by the digital community, the reality is, a massive transformation of the entire addressability ecosystem is inevitable in the long run. 

In this respect, whereas many companies, like the Trade Desk, for instance, are continuously developing their proprietary identity resolution tech, IAB Tech Lab has also taken a different path, offering online ad businesses to expand the scope of utilized solutions with a broader range of tools, less focused on persistent or somewhat persistent identifiers, like devices-based IDs.

Namely, closer to the end of 2024 the organization released its ID-Less Solutions Guidance, specifically developed by its Addressability and PETs working group to better showcase alternative approaches to attribution measurement, using the more privacy-centered mechanisms.

ID-Less Solutions Guidance: What’s Inside

Peculiarly enough, right in the first part of the guidance, its authors emphasize their primary focus on the ID-less addressability approach and outline cases out of its scope, e.g. those, where cross-party identifiers are being utilized to identify end users’ records within the so-called trusted-execution environments (TTEs), like data clean rooms. 

In this respect, the showcased ID-less tech solutions are designed to:

  • determine and disclose group-level audience data (e.g. user categories and cohorts) rather than user-level data elements, using first-party information about individual users;
  • leverage the context for digital ad display;
  • take advantage of aggregated attribution reports for better understanding of the ad campaign effectiveness across platforms and screens. 

Namely, when addressing challenges related to ad performance measurement, for example, the ID-Less Solutions Guidance encompasses a variety of methods to improve this aspect, from the more conventional techniques, like the use of promotional codes and brand lift studies, to the more advanced ones, like the creation of cross-context probabilistic cohorts & deterministic cohorts, just to name a few.

Here, the bad news is that the latter two, utilizing on-device tech and federated learning, provide limited scale both in terms of reported data and its use for the further campaign planning. 

Meanwhile, in terms of audience targeting mechanisms, the guidance also offers a wide variety of suggested methods, worthy of businesses’ consideration, from the use of contextual data and deterministic/probabilistic cohorts to private aggregation, PMP deals and Seller-defined Audiences (SDA) (recently renamed as “Curated Audiences”). 

Similarly though, each of the suggested ID-less solutions for this area of usage also implies a number of challenges, in terms of their adoption, like the limited support of the newly-emerging tech, comparatively lower precision of reported data and, certainly, high implementation costs.

Potential Benefits of the ID-Less Solutions Adoption

In spite of the obvious challenges associated with the use of ID-less technologies, their implementation, undoubtedly, provides significant benefits for all businesses involved in the digital advertising ecosystem. 

Namely, from both the publishers’ and advertisers’ perspective, the adoption of ID-less solutions potentially unlocks opportunities for the more efficient measurement of anonymous traffic, hence better decision making, simplifies compliance with various privacy laws and regulations, and helps improve revenue results on both sides. 

As of 2025, however, it’s obviously impossible to fully substitute ID-based solutions with the ID-less ones, if a company wishes to increase or at least sustain their financial outcomes. Instead, a potentially working approach is to complement the use of the former with the latter, hence enriching one’s business toolkit with new tech, while also having enough time and space to experiment with both.