PayPal Debuts Tool to Help Advertisers ID Customers

PayPal has debuted PayPal Ads ID, which it calls an “advertising identifier” rooted in verified commerce relationships.

“The digital advertising industry has long struggled with a foundational identity problem,” the company said in a Monday (April 27) news release.

PayPal cited data showing that only 21% of brands, agencies and publishers feel very confident that they can accurately identify and reach their target customer across digital channels.

“Cookies crumble across browsers,” the company added. “Device IDs fragment across platforms. IP addresses are unstable by design. They rotate, they’re shared across households, and they often identify a single device rather than a user. Inferred signals degrade at the moment they are needed most: activation.”

PayPal Ads ID aims to solve that. Unlike other identity solutions, PayPal Ads ID develops “aggregated, consented signals” from browsing behavior and across the PayPal ecosystem, tapping the same accounts customers use when they spend with PayPal or Venmo.

These are the same accounts consumers use when they spend money with PayPal or Venmo. Because it is verified at the point of purchase, PayPal Ads ID is “deterministic rather than probabilistic,” and consistent throughout browsers, devices, and sessions, the company added.

“Identity is the foundation everything else in advertising is built on. For too long, that foundation has been guesswork,” Mark Grether, senior vice president and general manager for PayPal Ads, said in the release. “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. That is the PayPal Transaction Graph at work.”

The Transaction Graph is a program PayPal debuted earlier this year, aimed at offering  merchants a “full-funnel” view of consumer spending habits across the internet.

By following actual verified purchases instead of just clicks or impressions, PayPal says it can give businesses a more accurate alternative to the “walled garden” ecosystems offered by traditional tech giants.

The graph connects signals across 430 million consumer accounts and tens of millions of merchants. According to the company, this lets advertisers see the “full dimensionality” of a purchase journey that other platforms might overlook.

“For instance, while a social media site might only see a user’s interest in a product, PayPal can track the entire process: a consumer searching for a product on one site, paying a friend via Venmo for a related expense, and ultimately completing a purchase through PayPal’s checkout,” PYMNTS wrote at the time.