Third-party cookies weren’t getting the job done for Indeed.

For years, Indeed, one of the leading job search platforms, relied on a combination of cookies and PII to reach and retarget job seekers, on and off of its site, and measure campaign performance. But ongoing signal loss was making its targeting far less efficient, which in turn made its media less valuable to Indeed’s actual customers, the employers trying to fill their open positions.

Google’s ever-moving third-party cookie deadline aside, trying to keep up with Safari, Firefox and Microsoft Edge users had already become difficult for Indeed’s product team.

So, two years ago, Indeed began working closely with LiveRamp to create a new audience engagement strategy that isn’t as vulnerable to third-party cookie deprecation.

“Being able to target people based on who we know they are, whether it’s on a cookie or email or other forms of matching, is really crucial,” Paul Bloom, a senior product manager on Indeed’s reach team, told AdExchanger.

On-ramping new audiences

 With over 350 million unique monthly visitors and 245 million resumes on file, Indeed already has a huge library of first-party data.

When users take a new action that reveals more insight into their behavior, such as applying to a job, they either get paired with an existing pseudonymous RampID or assigned a new one.

This process minimizes data movement and accelerates the end-to-end process of audience matching, said Lisa Cramer, head of embedded products at LiveRamp, whose job involves launching identity resolution products for cloud-based platforms such as Snowflake, Azure, AWS and GCP.

RampIDs are fully deterministic, according to Cramer, and are frequently updated based on consumer touch points, preferences and opt-outs. And rather than the “Wild West” of dealing with competing cookies from “a ton of different websites,” Bloom said, storing RampIDs in a centralized location makes it easier for users to opt out of tracking.

Indeed uses these IDs to build audiences via FreeWheel’s Beeswax platform.

The FreeWheel implementation allows Indeed to push audiences into Meta using Meta’s Conversion API, which is a tool for advertisers and publishers to share web, app or offline data with the platform directly from their server. This lets Indeed avoid retargeting job applicants with ads for positions they’ve already applied to, Bloom said.

More recently, Indeed has started testing audience matching through PAIR, Google’s identity solution, which enables advertisers and publishers using DV360 to combine their first-party data without actually sharing the data between parties. Indeed was part of Google’s alpha program for PAIR and was one of the first advertisers to test it.

“We need to do some more testing, but that’s [another] untouched frontier we have to better scale our ads,” Bloom said. “You can’t bid on all those impressions effectively for conversion without knowing a lot about who the user is and who the impression would be against.”

What’s next

So far, RampIDs appear more effective than third-party cookies were to begin with. Indeed’s retargeting audience has grown 54% and response rates are up 20%.

Greater reach translates to cheaper CPMs for the same clickthrough rate, as well as increased conversion rates and decreased cost per “apply start” – the metric Indeed uses for when someone begins an application through its site.

Unfortunately for current job seekers, there’s no clear indication yet of an increased hire rate as a result of all this growth. But proving causation between job ads and applications has always been challenging. Indeed’s data science team is hard at work figuring out how to fill in that gap, according to Bloom.

And they’ll still have third-party cookies to work with for the time being, because Indeed isn’t planning to go cold turkey just yet. “We will continue using third-party cookies as long as they’re available,” Bloom said.

But when Google finally rips off the Band-Aid, he’s confident Indeed will be ready for it.

“We know we’re going to be able to deliver outcomes for jobseekers and employers beyond Indeed for years to come,” said Bloom. “There’s no fear for us in the immediate future about the changes browsers are going to make to their data standards.”