As a result of GDPR privacy provisions, media companies took steps that have made accurate account based IP targeting challenging. To improve results for our customers, 6sense has joined IAB’s Transparency Consent Framework (TCF 2.0). As a certified participant, 6sense will have the ability to serve compliant digital ad targeting in the EU where users have provided direct consent. We anticipate that overall reach within the EU may be lower and vary by region, however, our account-audience matching will continue to meet our high standards for campaign delivery.
How to target EU Accounts with 6sense
6sense Display Campaigns – 6sense works with top providers to make available quality inventory, safely, at scale. Set up a 6sense display campaign to leverage your 6sense segments in EU. Read below for what to expect when targeting the EU.
6sense Segments for LinkedIn Ads – Advertise through LinkedIn’s closed network to accounts within the EU. By default, LinkedIn has first-party consent to advertise to their users. Learn more about the solution in our How-to guide and FAQs.
6sense Visitor Retargeting – Leverage a cookie-based retargeting approach to skirt around the red-tape of IP targeting. Learn more in our How-to guide and FAQs.
6sense Account Based Audiences – The 6sense audience engine is still available to create predictive, behavioral and intent-driven audience strategies to enable use cases including proactive sales prospecting and prioritization, CPL programs, targeted email and event invite strategies, etc. to help generate engagement and opportunities from the right target audiences for your brand.
Google Ads Retargeting – If you use Google Analytics, the 6sense team can help you connect our Company Identification API to your 1st party / cookie-based advertising efforts, including in the EU. This will enable you to develop ABM audience-based re-targeting programs to deliver unique messages to accounts from target audiences that visit your page, opt-in to your cookie-based targeting, and then track the results at an ABM-level via our external media tracking pixels.
We continue to actively monitor and adjust to the evolving data privacy landscape and recommend that you work closely with your CS team member to address your specific needs.
Details
We at 6sense take privacy regulations very seriously, and are following the lead of the major networks we partner with and the guidance of our trade associations to ensure we protect our customers, our brand and the individual rights of EU citizens. We also stand firmly by our commitment to provide accurate account-based targeting solutions that can stand up to our double-audit standards and ensure our customer’s budgets are spent on inventory that truly reaches the accounts they target in our platform and are not wasted on the wrong audiences.
Following passage of the GDPR, companies within the market, and in particular, publishers and ad-exchanges, implemented precautionary measures to ensure that personal information (which under the GDPR includes IPs) within their systems was protected in compliance with the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive – with one such measure being the truncation of the last octet of IP addresses. (Learn more about privacy & IP truncation here – which has since been expanded to all EU countries). Because this approach obfuscates key identifying information, it hampers the ability to accurately target IPs. While targeting the truncated IPs can still be done, the approach is not accurate and the lack of specificity in the targeting may end up targeting not 1 IP, but 200 plus IPs that were not intended to be targeted. From 6sense perspective this could result in wasteful spend and inaccurate results and therefore 6sense did not adopt this approach.
Instead, to adjust to the changes in the EU, 6sense initiated a wide review of alternate options and has begun to redesign our campaign system for the EU with a focus on expanded reach consistent with strong EU compliance principles. To that end, and following industry best practices, 6sense has joined the IAB’s Transparency Consent Framework and is IAB TCF 2.0 certified. This allows us to participate in systems that provide compliant digital ad targeting in the EU through our vendors against non-truncated IPs where data subjects have provided direct consent, enabling us to offer more accurate account-audience matching that meet our high standards for campaign delivery.
What this means for 6sense programmatic EU-based ad campaigns today:
We have begun testing EU programs under our new TCF 2.0 approach; we expect this will result in some improved exposure, but we still expect to see a lower volume of targeted results in the EU than other regions, as stricter opt-in rules in the EU mean less available inventory can be accessed. It’s also possible that the results may vary by geographic location, with some countries (such as Germany) remaining relatively sparse, while others, such as the UK, providing broader results, as the default user settings to provide consent may vary by country.
Given the power and scope of our account identity graph, we are confident that our results will provide greater accuracy compared to other vendors in our space, but we do not guarantee a specific level of results given the amount of flux which has permeated the EU market.
Persona targeting is not recommended for EU targeted campaigns as reach would be low due to limited availability of “data segments” in the programmatic advertising ecosystem.
Customers looking to broaden their reach in the EU will see significant benefit from the 6sense Segments for LinkedIn feature by combining 6sense’s native display and LinkedIn’s advertising capabilities
6sense retargeting is an additional way to leverage 6sense segments in the EU. Since retargeting relies on cookies (not IPs), we’re able to target on any available cookies (as that means they’ve been collected with first party consent).