Measuring and optimizing streaming ad campaigns in real time is no small feat!
Our advertising platform is continuously learning from the event data that advertisers send us through the Roku Pixel and Events API to better understand and optimize your streaming ads to drive better marketing results.
We offer additional measurement tools like First-Party Cookies and Advanced Alias Matching to further improve matching of website and app events to the streaming ads you run through Roku Ads Manager.
To manage these features, go to your ad account’s Events page, select an event group (if applicable), click “Settings” and then “Data collection options,” as pictured and further described below.
While we will automatically enable first-party cookies, advanced alias matching must be manually enabled.
When enabled, these two features provide enhanced measurement and optimization capabilities. Better measurement can lead to higher attribution rates, which can help improve your campaign’s optimization and drive an overall lower cost-per-action.
We'll dive into each feature in more detail below:
First Party cookie matching
What is it?
First-party cookies are created by your website via the Roku Pixel and are limited to use solely on your web domain. Third-party cookies can collect data and log events across different sites and sessions.
As third-party cookie deprecation continues, for example with the rise of third-party cookie blocking technologies, the use of both first- and third-party cookies to supplement event data shared with Roku should generally improve the quality and dependability of event data.
Third-party cookies are always on for the Roku Pixel and partner-integrated pixels, whereas first-party cookies are optional.
To manage use of the Roku Pixel with first party cookies, go to the Events page and choose “Settings.” First-party cookies is enabled by default, so you must disable it if you prefer not to use it. However, we strongly encourage users to pass back this value to enhance measurement and optimization.
Why is it important?
First-party cookie matching helps you to:
Improve targeting & optimization: Reach specific customer segments with relevant ads that are based on their combined browsing and purchase history.
Boost campaign performance: Optimize campaigns by measuring which ads lead to conversions for specific customer segments.
Gain valuable insights: Analyze customer journeys across platforms, understand ad effectiveness, and improve retargeting efforts.
Who should use it?
Generally, any ad account collecting event data should use this feature as it may help with measurement, optimization, and potentially lowering CPA. More specifically, here are the types of advertisers that can benefit from first-party cookie matching:
Marketers with rich first-party data: If you have customer data like email addresses, purchase history, or website behavior, matching it with ad insights can be highly informative.
Businesses seeking deeper audience understanding: To personalize advertising and understand campaign effectiveness, first-party cookie matching is essential to connecting ad interactions with customers.
Advanced Alias Matching
What is it?
Advanced alias matching is a tool used to improve the accuracy and completeness of attribution data gathered from the Roku Pixel tracking. In addition to the standard parameters that are normally gathered, Advanced alias matching enables you to send us customer information (e.g., emails and phone numbers) that can be gathered, for instance, when a visitor lands on your website and fills out a form during registration, sign-in, contact, or checkout. This helps us attribute events to ads run through Roku Ads Manger to better understand the impact and performance of your streaming ads.
Why is it important?
Traditional data analysis often suffers from missing or incomplete user information due to device fragmentation. Advanced alias matching helps mitigate these challenges and can strengthen campaign performance by:
Improving data quality: More accurate data analysis leads to better decision-making.
Boosting campaign performance: Precise attribution and targeting can result in better ROI.
Gaining user insights: Understanding cross-device behavior provides valuable audience information.
Who should use it?
Any advertiser or marketer working with event data can benefit from advanced alias matching:
Growth/performance marketers: To get a more accurate picture of campaign reach, attribution, and conversion rates.
Brand advertisers: To understand cross-device user journeys and optimize brand awareness campaigns.
Data analysts: To gain deeper insights into user behavior and improve audience targeting efforts.
How does it work?
By enabling advanced alias matching, the Roku Pixel can automatically find form fields on pages of the advertiser’s website where the Roku Pixel is installed containing customer information, such as phone number and email, when a designated form event occurs to capture information from the email or phone input fields.
The Roku Pixel can automatically collect customer information (e.g., phone number and email) from form fields on your website.
That information is appended to the information gathered by the Roku Pixel for measurement, optimization and targeting of campaigns. The hashed information is then securely transferred to Roku via HTTPS. This provides more complete data that can improve attribution and optimize CPAs.
Manual alias matching
Advertisers also have the option to manually append phone number and email to a Roku Pixel event, just as they would other metadata. This is called manual advanced alias matching and can be used in addition to, or instead of, automatic advanced alias matching (described above). Roku supports the following metadata parameters for manual advanced alias matching:
phone - a raw phone number for a customer
email - a raw email address for a customer
hashed_phone - a SHA256 hash of the phone number for a customer. Before hashing, the phone number should have all characters other than +0-9 removed and it should then be formatted in the E164 format.
hashed_email - a SHA256 hash of the email address for a customer. Before hashing, the email address should be canonicalized by performing the following steps:
if the domain is "ymail.com" then replace it with "yahoo.com"
if the domain is "googlemail.com" then replace it with "gmail.com"
if the domain is "yahoo.com" or "yahoo." followed by any other two letters, then remove any - characters and anything following them from the user part of the address
if the domain is "gmail.com" then remove any + characters and anything following them from the user part of the address. Also remove any “.” characters from the user part of the address. Any raw email or phone passed appended to an event will be hashed before it’s sent to Roku.
If both phone and hashed_phone or email and hashed_email are sent, then the hashed version will take priority
If multiple events are sent with phone or email appended for a given user, the phone or email is the most recent event will take precedence.
Privacy
Consistent with standard industry practice, customer emails and phone numbers are hashed using a hashing algorithm (SHA-256) before reaching Roku servers for matching. Learn more about how this information is used in our Terms and Conditions.