As email becomes an even more vital channel for addressability and growing your brand, LiveIntent is planning some exciting updates to bring more value to your email inventory.

What brought on these changes?

Due to Apple Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), we’ve seen an increase in machine opens, which inflated impression metrics and decreased CPMs and CTR. We first rolled out our Adjusted Metrics to remove these machine opens from our reporting and give our clients more accurate data. Since LiveIntent rolled out Adjusted Metrics, we’ve continued to observe the dynamics of the email ecosystem and research more ways to combat the effects of Apple MPP and other proxied environments to come.

What’s LiveIntent’s solution?

The first phase of these changes began in February 2024 when we installed a global floor on the LiveIntent DSP. By implementing a global floor, the goal is to eliminate the low-value ad requests caused by machine opens that are inflating the exchange. This will make your email inventory more competitive in the long term and achieve higher CTR, eCPMs, and revenue.

How will this affect my email inventory?

Due to this change, Adjusted Impressions and Fill Rate will decrease for those monetizing through the exchange. Please note this is a result of weeding out impressions caused by machine opens, not real engaged users who are clicking on ads. Therefore, we do not expect negative impacts on revenue. In fact, early tests have shown an increase in CPMs and revenue so far. We will also be evolving the Fill Rate metric to remove machine opens, which will give you a better picture of your email health. We will continue to closely monitor this change over the next couple of weeks to evaluate the performance.

While the volume of our demand hasn’t changed, you may see an increase in collapsed ad slots due to fewer bids on machine opens. If you are hardcoding the “Advertisement” slug above your ad slots, readers will continue to see this over a blank space in your newsletters. To avoid interrupting the reader experience, we recommend utilizing our Ad Indicator feature. You can easily customize the text in the LiveIntent platform, and if there’s no demand, the Ad Indicator will collapse along with the ad slot. With the updated version of our LiveTag, you can have separate settings for your display and native creatives.

This update can also impact non-guaranteed direct-sold and house campaigns (including fallback) if your inventory is open to the exchange. If you are setting up a non-guaranteed direct-sold or house campaign (including fallback) with a CPM lower than $0.03, you will see the below message:

Should I add floors to my inventory as well?

We do not recommend implementing additional floors to your email inventory. The global floor was put in place to combat the effects of Apple MPP on your valuable inventory. If you want to further remove unwanted ads from appearing in your newsletters, we recommend utilizing our blocking tools instead.

Floors work differently in email than on the open web due to the nature of the email channel. Most of LiveIntent’s demand is coming from our DSP and is tied to performance, so our algorithm looks at the probability of a click or conversion to determine the bid value. If a floor is above that rate, the inventory gets cut off from the auction, instead of the auction adjusting to take the floor into account.

Due to this, floors will have little impact on the quality of ads that are served — since low-quality ads tend to perform better, those advertisers have higher budgets and can spend more on their campaigns, getting around publisher floors. While adding a floor can lead to a higher CPM, it will cut into the available demand and remove higher-quality advertisers that you do want. This leads to a lower, and more inconsistent, fill rate, and a decrease in revenue. The best way to ensure that your newsletter remains brand-safe is to use the aforementioned blocking tools.

This article goes through the different blocking tools that LiveIntent has available; please reach out to your LiveIntent team to discuss setting up these tools for your inventory.

If you are looking to take further action to clean up your email lists impacted by Apple MPP, we suggest cleansing your email list to remove inactive and dormant users who aren’t actively opening your email sends. Doing this will improve your engagement since you will be reaching users who are more invested in your content. LiveIntent has a suite of email intelligence solutions, including Email Reactivation, that can help support you in this process. We also recommend implementing LiveConnect Email Extension in your newsletters to help combat Apple MPP and improve resolution.

Please reach out to your LiveIntent account manager should you have any questions or concerns about this change, or if you’re interested in our email intelligence solutions and LiveConnect Email Extension.