How Bid Enrichment Unlocked +31% Revenue Growth

A popular fan-driven music community that attracts a highly engaged audience and has over four minutes per session, a low bounce rate, and a 60% return visitor rate.

But in programmatic, engagement alone doesn’t drive revenue; signal quality does. Nearly 45% of the site’s traffic came from Safari, where users are largely unaddressable due to cookie restrictions. As a result, a significant portion of impressions entered the auction with limited signals, making them harder for buyers to recognize, target, and bid on competitively.

The outcome: lower bid density, reduced competition, and undervalued inventory.

Adapex deployed Magnify™, its identity and bid enrichment solution, to improve how each impression was represented in the auction. Rather than relying on a single identifier, Magnify focuses on enriching the bidstream with multiple layers of signals, so buyers can better understand the user and assign higher value to each impression.

Key initiatives included:

1. Expanding Identity Signals to Improve Match Rates

Magnify activated and optimized a range of leading identity solutions, including ID5, Audigent Hadron, Lotame Panorama ID, UID2, Criteo ID, and Epsilon COREid. This increased the likelihood that buyers could recognize users across environments, directly improving match rates and bid participation.

2. Strengthening Bid Performance with Hashed Email Signals

Hashed emails (HEMs) were associated with over 45% of users, providing a high-confidence, privacy-compliant identifier. This gave buyers stronger signals to anchor their bidding strategies, particularly valuable in environments where cookies are unavailable.

3. Optimizing the Auction Path for Signal Visibility

Adapex ensured that nearly half of all impressions flowed through Prebid, where enriched signals are most effectively passed to demand partners. This maximized the number of opportunities where bid enrichment could directly influence auction outcomes.

4. Increasing Signal Density Over Time

With long session durations, ~40% of impressions were refreshed, creating additional opportunities to attach IDs and signals.  Each subsequent impression entered the auction with more data, stronger signals, and higher bid potential.

Why This Matters: Better Signals → Better Bids

Bid enrichment doesn’t just “add data”, it changes how impressions perform in the auction:

• Higher match rates → more buyers can participate
• Stronger signals → buyers bid with greater confidence
• Improved targeting → increased demand relevance
• Greater competition → higher clearing prices (RPMs)

This is especially critical in cookieless environments like Safari, where signal loss typically suppresses value.

With stronger signals flowing into the bidstream, the site saw consistent performance gains across all browsers and a step-change improvement in Safari. With 45% of traffic on Safari, this segment alone contributed over 40% of total revenue uplift, demonstrating the direct impact of improving signal quality where it matters most.

This case study highlights a fundamental shift in programmatic performance: Revenue is no longer just about demand; it’s about how well your inventory is understood.

By adding stronger identity, audience, and contextual signals to the bidstream, Magnify™ turned previously undervalued impressions into highly competitive auction opportunities. The result isn’t a temporary spike; it is sustained revenue growth driven by better data, smarter bidding, and stronger signal quality across every impression.

“We’ve always known our audience was engaged. Magnify helped translate that into something buyers could actually act on. As signals improved, so did competition in the auction, and the lift in RPM has been both clear and sustained.” – Publisher