Measuring Savings with UTIQ: Cookie Overlap and Frequency Capping Optimization
In every campaign, UTIQ is able to calculate savings by reducing waste caused by cookie overlap. Since a single UTIQ token corresponds to multiple cookies, working with UTIQ leads to direct cost savings by eliminating redundant impressions.
These savings are clearly visible in the UTIQ Dashboard and Reporting, providing advertisers with transparency into the efficiencies gained.
To reach the same number of unique individuals, a significantly higher budget would have been required due to cookie duplication, as shown in the screenshot. Utiq eliminates this inefficiency, allowing you to reach the same audience while spending less.
However, there is an additional layer of savings that traditional campaigns are unable to measure—those resulting from frequency capping optimization. In most DSPs, frequency capping relies on cookies, which leads to impressions being served even after the frequency limit has been reached. Some advertisers have reported that up to 40% of impressions in leading DSP platforms exceed their intended frequency cap, leading to unnecessary spend with no added value.
UTIQ eliminates this issue by leveraging deterministic user identification, ensuring that frequency capping is accurately applied at the user level rather than at the cookie level.
To quantify these savings, an A/B test configuration is required. This test involves setting up two identical deals:
A second deal where frequency capping is managed by the DSP, following traditional cookie-based limitations.
One deal where UTIQ manages frequency capping deterministically at the user level.
To ensure accuracy, the target audience is split evenly across the population, with each half assigned to one of the two deals. By comparing the performance of both DSP executions, advertisers can measure the precise cost savings generated by UTIQ’s superior frequency management.
This test is highly recommended at the start of any partnership with a new advertiser to establish the potential savings margin from UTIQ’s frequency capping capabilities. Once the effectiveness is proven, advertisers are encouraged to consolidate into a single deal managed entirely by UTIQ, maximizing efficiency while maintaining optimal frequency control—although at this stage, direct savings from frequency capping would no longer be measurable.
Let’s see an example where:
In this deal, UTIQ's role is purely on the measurement side. UTIQ is not capping or limiting impressions, it is measuring, with deterministic precision, how many impressions are being delivered beyond the intended frequency cap. The actual frequency capping is applied by the DSP, which uses its own algorithm based on cookies to control exposure. This distinction matters because cookie-based capping is inherently imprecise: the DSP may believe it is respecting the cap, but without a person-based identity layer, it cannot account for cookie duplication or deletion. UTIQ acts as the independent, deterministic layer that reveals the real picture showing whether the DSP's cookie-based capping is actually delivering the intended frequency distribution at a user level.
In the second deal, UTIQ goes one step further: it is not only measuring but also actively limiting the frequency of impressions at a deterministic, person-based level. This means that once a real user has been exposed the intended number of times, UTIQ ensures no further impressions are delivered to that person, regardless of how many cookies they may have. However, precisely because UTIQ is enforcing the cap effectively, we lose visibility into how bad the cookie-based scenario would have been without it.
We cannot see the wasted impressions because UTIQ is preventing them from happening. That is why the measurement-only deal is essential: by letting the DSP run its cookie-based capping without UTIQ's limitation in the previous deal, we can observe the actual percentage of impressions delivered beyond the intended frequency cap. This gives us the real waste baseline, which we then use to calculate the true savings generated when UTIQ's deterministic capping is active.