The Global ID Tracker by Roqad provides a transparent view of identity signals across the digital advertising ecosystem, helping partners understand how identifiers appear and evolve across European bidstreams.

As the digital advertising ecosystem continues to evolve, identity resolution remains one of the most important components of modern adtech infrastructure. Advertisers, publishers and platforms rely on identity signals to connect audiences across devices, measure campaign performance and enable addressable advertising while maintaining strong privacy protections.

At Roqad, we operate one of Europe’s largest privacy-first identity graphs. Because our technology sits directly within the programmatic ecosystem, we have a unique perspective on how identity signals appear within bidstreams across markets.

The Global ID Tracker provides regular insights into the presence and performance of universal, extended and alternative identifiers observed across programmatic environments. The goal is simple: to provide transparency into how identity signals are evolving and how different identifiers coexist within the advertising ecosystem.

Rather than relying on a single identifier, today’s digital advertising infrastructure operates across a wide range of identity signals. These include browser-based identifiers, mobile advertising IDs, connected TV identifiers and privacy-enhanced identity frameworks.

Roqad’s identity graph connects these signals across devices and environments, allowing advertisers and platforms to recognise audiences while maintaining privacy compliance and consent management across markets.

Through the Global ID Tracker, we monitor the presence of these identifiers within European bidstreams and group them by relative volume and adoption.

Europe — Identifier Landscape
The European programmatic ecosystem contains a diverse set of identity signals operating simultaneously. Many publishers deploy multiple identifiers within a single page or application environment, allowing demand-side platforms and advertisers to recognise users through different identity frameworks.

This multi-ID environment reflects the complexity of the modern advertising ecosystem, where multiple identity providers coexist and serve different functions within the programmatic supply chain.
Across bidstreams we typically observe identifiers falling into several categories:
Privacy-enhanced identifiers

These identifiers rely on encryption or tokenisation techniques to protect user data while enabling addressability. They are often tied to consent frameworks and designed to support privacy-compliant advertising workflows.

Partner-specific identifiers
Some identity frameworks operate within closed partner ecosystems, where identifiers are encrypted or translated for specific partners within the advertising supply chain.
Open identifiers

Other identifiers remain unencrypted within the bidstream and function as shared identifiers across platforms. These identifiers can enable broader interoperability but may operate differently depending on publisher implementation.

The Global ID Tracker monitors how these different identity frameworks appear across bidstreams and how adoption shifts over time.
Why Identity Graphs Matter
Modern advertising increasingly relies on connecting fragmented signals across devices and platforms. A single consumer may interact with content across mobile devices, web browsers and connected TV environments, each producing different identity signals.

Roqad’s identity graph connects these signals into a unified framework, enabling advertisers, platforms and data partners to recognise audiences across environments while maintaining privacy-first infrastructure.

This approach enables:

• Cross-device audience recognition
• Improved addressable reach
• Identity resolution across web, mobile and connected TV
• Privacy-compliant data activation and measurement

As identity infrastructure continues to evolve, transparency into how identifiers operate within the programmatic ecosystem remains critical. The Global ID Tracker helps provide that visibility while supporting informed decisions about identity infrastructure and data strategy.
Roqad will continue monitoring identity signals across the ecosystem and sharing insights into how the identity landscape evolves across markets.
If you’re interested in understanding how Roqad’s identity graph can integrate into your identity infrastructure, get in touch with our team.