The news: PayPal debuted Ads ID, an advertising identifier that helps marketers reach target audiences with greater certainty through signals across its network, per a press release.

Ads ID is an identity layer built on real PayPal users’ accounts, letting advertisers follow money movement from over 25 billion transactions and more than 400 million PayPal and Venmo users. 

Why this matters: Marketers can explicitly connect ads to sales through PayPal’s control of identity and commerce data—making tracking attributable sales to ads possible in a way that retail media networks (RMN) cannot. 

This kind of data availability also can help advertisers cut down on programmatic waste through measurable attribution, reach intended audiences, and recognize audiences across different surfaces. This could be especially helpful as privacy laws around cookies strengthen, offering a new approach for reaching targeted audiences.

Zooming out: We forecast that US financial media network (FMN) ad spending will grow 89.5% YoY, but it still only constitutes a paltry 1.5% of all commerce media ad spending this year.