A study measuring the linkages between Internet Protocol (IP) addresses to US households and individual email addresses reveals a number of costly inaccuracies. The research demonstrates that IP addresses are not always reliable as a stable identifier for digital targeting and measurement, calling for industry-wide collaboration to improve the fidelity of marketing signals that the industry currently uses to trade on.

Commissioned jointly by the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) and Go Addressable and conducted by Truthset – the data-validation company improving the accuracy of identity and demographic data – the study benchmarked nearly 1 billion IP records from six major data providers against an accurate database of IP address to household assignments provided by two leading Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and one leading Multichannel Video Programming Distributor (MVPD). The result marks a real-world validation of IP data accuracy at scale.

Key findings from the study include: 

• IP-to-postal linkages are accurate, on average, just 13 per cent of the time.

• IP-to-email linkages are accurate, on average, just 16 per cent of the time.

• Data providers agree only 6.4 per cent of the time on IP-to-postal linkages and 2.8 per cent of the time on IP-to-email linkages, with the large majority of linkages over the same 90-day period unique to each provider.

• There are 3x more IPs-per-postal than there should be, compared to ISP reports.

• IP timestamp reporting is inconsistent across providers, with conflicting definitions of ‘first seen’, ‘last seen’ or ‘versioned’, undermining comparability

• When (time of year) and where (state-level geography) both impact IP linkage accuracy.

• IPv6s are under-represented by 72 per cent in large datasets, with only 15 per cent of commercial files capturing them.

“The state of IP data today is messy, despite the billions spent trading on it,” said Kathryn Barnitt, Head of Data Science at Truthset. “By benchmarking against ISP truth sets, we can finally quantify where error enters the chain and begin to fix it.”

“Accurate identity resolution is critical for the future of addressable TV advertising and cross-platform measurement,” said Tim Myers, Executive Director at Go Addressable, the trade organisation founded by AMC Networks, Comcast Advertising, DirecTV Advertising, DISH Media, and Spectrum Reach. “However, this study shows IP addresses cannot accurately be used to identify and serve ads to the consumer or household as the primary method to target and measure. This sets the stage for industry-wide improvements and reinforces why advertisers and agencies should be using more deterministic identifiers.”

“IP addresses remain a foundational identifier for CTV, programmatic, and addressable advertising,” said Jon Watts, Managing Director at CIMM. “Inaccuracies in IP-to-household data can erode advertiser confidence in its reliability for audience targeting, attribution and measurement. Greater transparency and stronger standards are the essential next step to unlocking scalable, accurate addressable advertising. We hope strongly that this study is a positive next step in developing more robust quality controls and checks across the market and looking forward to working with stakeholders to deliver real improvements. This is a fixable problem.”

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Categories: Advertising, Articles, Markets, Research, Targetted

Tags: addressable advertising, CIMM