Series: Playbook Previews
Too many campaigns keep paying to reach the same people who already converted. Identity-based suppression fixes this — cutting wasted impressions by 20–30% and unlocking budget for real growth across QSR, CPG, and legal brands.
Why Suppression Matters and Who Gains
If your ads still target recent purchasers or recent intake inquiries, you're bleeding money. Identity-based suppression prevents wasting impressions on audiences who have already converted, reallocating that budget to high-potential prospects.
Recent findings show up to 37% of programmatic impressions go to already-converted users when suppression isn’t properly implemented (AdExchanger, 2024). For QSR, CPG, and legal marketers, this is budget loss that directly impacts ROI.
Below, real-world examples illustrate how brands are solving this problem.
QSR: Reallocating Impressions for Fresh Foot Traffic
For a national quick-service restaurant, AiOpti’s Super AIdentity Graph℠ reduced wasted impressions by 27% by suppressing loyalty app purchasers in real time.
That freed up budget to reach new households, increasing incremental foot traffic by 19% over a single weekend campaign. Instead of bombarding recent buyers, spend shifted toward untapped audiences, fueling growth without raising costs.
CPG: Smarter Media with Retail Identity Suppression
Fast-moving consumer goods brands often rely on retail partners for shopper data — but lack visibility into who purchased when.
By integrating transactional IDs from retail partners, one CPG brand suppressed known buyers and retargeted lapsed customers instead.
The outcome:
- 18% improvement in targeting efficiency
- 22% lower wasted CPMs
- Higher ROI with the same media spend
(Consumer Goods Technology, 2024)
Legal Services: Reducing Lead Acquisition Costs
Legal firms frequently face high acquisition costs due to redundant ad exposure on already-converted leads.
One firm adopted identity-based suppression across search, display, and social. By excluding recent form submissions in real time, they:
- Cut cost per acquisition (CPA) by 30%
- Reduced irrelevant leads by 24%
- Increased verified new consultations without spending more
(Law.com Marketing Benchmark Report, 2024)
The Broader Media Waste Problem
Without identity-level suppression, most campaigns default to device IDs, cookies, or panels, all of which create duplication, lag, and inaccuracies.
- Device-based suppression misses cross-device users
- Cookie-based suppression fails in cookieless browsers
- Panels can’t update in real time
As a result, ad budgets recirculate on existing customers instead of acquiring new ones (Marketing Dive, 2025).
How Identity-Based Suppression Works
To be effective, suppression must operate at the identity graph level, not devices or sessions. Modern identity suppression includes:
- Deterministic identity resolution — linking impressions to real people via hashed emails, loyalty IDs, and transaction data (Onetrust, 2025)
- Real-time conversion mapping — removing converters within minutes, not days
- Cross-channel enforcement — suppression logic spanning display, CTV, social, search, email, and in-app ads
- Frequency suppression — limiting overexposure to high-frequency, low-response audiences
First Steps for Marketers
| Step | Action |
|---|---|
| 1 | Audit current suppression logic. If it’s cookie or device-based, it’s insufficient. |
| 2 | Integrate deterministic identity data: loyalty IDs, CRM records, hashed email. |
| 3 | Set suppression windows: e.g., exclude recent converters for 7–14 days. |
| 4 | Test across channels and measure CPA, ROI, and impression waste reduction. |
| 5 | Scale logic into CRM, programmatic, social, and CTV buys. |
TL;DR: What This Means for You
Stop paying to show ads to people who already converted.
Identity-based suppression:
- Cuts wasted spend by 20–30%
- Increases ROI without raising budgets
- Expands reach to net-new, high-value audiences
Coming soon: The First-Party Data Playbook, a full guide to suppression thresholds, identity integrations, and testing frameworks.
