What you need to know:

• Marketers misguided over how much of their audience they are actually hitting, per study from firm backing location data as an alternative to IDs.
• If your partners tell you they’re still reaching your precise audiences at scale with ID-only or cookie-led solutions, you’ll see that the numbers in our ‘missing audience calculator’ tell a different story”, per Blis CTO, Aaron McKee.

Location advertising firm Blis has released a study that shows mobile marketers are missing out on as much as 46 per cent of addressable audiences by relying on digital IDs that don't enable them to reach critical online audiences. 

The study suggests that almost half of the digital addressable audiences on mobile – and nearly half on desktop – are being missed due to IDs. It covers Europe, the US, Australia and New Zealand. 

Around the world, three quarters of iPhone users have opted not to share their data. Additionally, Safari, Microsoft Edge and Firefox had dismissed cookies by 2019, leaving Chrome as the last hold out on removing cookies – until next year. Given this, not only is the ability to reach the right people at scale suffering, but audience quality is too.

“There’s still this belief that brands are achieving the right audience at scale – and that that will only change once the Chrome deprecation comes into force,” said Aaron McKee, CTO at Blis.

“But the current reality is much more troubling, as advertisers that still rely on IDs are already missing out on almost half of their audiences. This is happening right now, in front of our eyes and marketers need to have the right questions in mind when choosing their advertising partners," he added.

"Today, not tomorrow. If your partners tell you they’re still reaching your precise audiences at scale with ID-only or cookie-led solutions, you’ll see that the numbers in our ‘missing audience calculator’ tell a different story”.

The firm – which touts location-based technology as a solution – has a new guide detailing which audience segments are most affected and how to reduce the impact.