Patch Media leverages Criteo’s Hashed Email Solution to maximize the value of logged-in traffic

The challenge: Preparing proactively for the cookieless future

Patch Media runs a network of hyperlocal websites, providing community news to over 1,200 towns across America. Its award-winning journalism attracts over 3 million daily visitors each month, with an impressive 41% user log-in rate, making Patch Media a premier destination for local news.

Staying true to their commitment to strengthen communities with locally relevant news and information, Patch Media wanted to test and scale sustainable addressability solutions, especially maintain addressability when no other identifier available. Their goal was to maintain the quality and relevance of ads across their properties while preserving performance and ROI for their ad partners in environments without third-party cookies. The company also wanted to regain CPM loss resulting from cookieless environments.

The solution: Unlocking greater spend

As the industry works to integrate alternative IDs and addressability solutions at scale, Patch Media needed a complementary approach that leveraged its logged-in site strategy to solve performance challenges for advertisers in the absence of third-party cookies.

Leveraging Criteo’s hashed email (HEM) identification solution, Patch Media began sharing HEMs in the bidstream to deliver an addressable audience to Criteo’s 18,000+ advertisers—tapping into billions of dollars of annual ad spend from Criteo’s premium demand partners. Beginning with 1% of bid requests, Patch Media quickly scaled to 100% of traffic and was able to recapture CPMs in cookie-compromised environments, with a 25% increase in CPMs across Firefox and Safari inventory.

Patch Media concluded that by incorporating Criteo’s hashed email ID solution now, rather than waiting for third-party cookie deprecation, they unlocked greater spend today while preparing for tomorrow.

The results: Generating incremental revenue with sustainable targeting

Compared to other hashed email or alternative ID solutions, which average a match rate of 35–55%, Criteo’s HEM solution boasted an impressive 85% match rate across Criteo’s buy-side partners, enabling Patch Media to securely connect its known audiences with thousands of advertisers also sharing HEMs with Criteo.

In total, the effort generated a 52% increase in overall CPMs by making previously unknown Firefox and Safari users fully addressable through HEM-based matching, along with a notable 37% increase in incremental requests made addressable thanks to Criteo’s hashed email solution.