PayPal Ads and PubMatic unite to deliver unparalleled audience insights, helping brands connect with high-intent consumers through verified purchase behaviors
In today’s competitive advertising landscape reaching consumers with genuine purchase intent is the ultimate differentiator. That’s why PayPal Ads and PubMatic have joined forces through the Activate platform to deliver a breakthrough advertising solution that transforms how brands connect with their most valuable audiences.
Verified Intent: The New Currency
As a leading global payments platform processing over 400 transactions per second across tens of millions of merchants, PayPal Ads’s transaction graph provides unique visibility into consumer purchasing behaviors across diverse markets and categories.
PayPal Ad’s audiences are valuable precisely because of their authenticity – based on deterministic patterns rather than behavioral inference. Audience segments like “Retail Subscription Shoppers” or “Sports Lovers” are built from analyzed trends across actual transaction insights, not assumptions, creating accuracy in category preferences, purchase frequency and spending behaviors.
A Partnership Built for Performance
“At PayPal Ads, we’re committed to pushing the boundaries of innovation in digital advertising by leveraging insights from the trillions of transactions that take place on our platform,” said Mark Grether, Senior Vice President and General Manager, PayPal Ads. “Working with PubMatic allows us to deliver impactful advertising solutions through our transaction graph, helping advertisers connect with high-intent audiences based on verified purchasing patterns.”
The collaboration brings together PayPal Ads’s rich commerce insights with PubMatic’s premium programmatic platform, creating advertising opportunities that traditional behavioral targeting simply cannot match.
Real Results: Commerce Media in Action
The partnership is already demonstrating remarkable results. By using verified audience segments instead of segments based on assumed interests, a national beauty retailer achieved something rare: strong performance across both broad reach and precision activation.
- Universal impact: 8.2% Brand Awareness lift across all audiences
- Precision results: 21.6% Brand Consideration lift + 17.3% Brand Recommendation lift among A18-24 demographic1
This dual success shows how commerce media provides both reach and relevance when based on verified intent instead of assumptions. These results far surpass industry standards, achieving a brand awareness increase 27 times higher than DISQO’s 20252 benchmark average of 0.30 points across more than 1,650 campaigns, confirming the superior performance of commerce media’s verified audience approach.
The Technical Innovation Behind Success
PubMatic’s integrated platform provides the technological backbone that makes this partnership exceptionally powerful. Through our Connect curation platform and Activate direct bidding solution, advertisers gain access to:
- Premium Publisher Network: Reach audiences across 2,000+ premium publishers with brand-safe, high-quality placements
- Unified Insights & Activation: Combine PayPal’s transaction graph with first-party advertiser insights for even more precise targeting
- Complete Omnichannel Activation: Execute campaigns across CTV, mobile, desktop, and emerging formats through a single platform
- AI-Powered Optimization: Leverage advanced bidding algorithms and real-time optimization to maximize campaign performance
The Future of Commerce Media
By leveraging PayPal Ads’s transaction graph across PubMatic’s entire publisher network, advertisers can now reach verified purchasers wherever they consume content, not just during shopping moments or on commerce platforms.
The partnership is immediately available in the United States. Early adopters gain access to:
- Pre-built audience segments across all major verticals: Audience segments are built not only from one merchant, but a cross-merchant graph that spans tens of millions of merchants
- Custom audience creation for specific campaign needs: Advertisers can define and tailor audiences using PayPal’s rich data signals to precisely align with campaign objectives.
- Flexible activation options: Brands can choose the buying method that best fits their strategy, whether through white-glove support or automated programmatic channels.
- Advanced measurement capabilities: Marketers gain actionable insights from analytics ranging from brand lift studies to closed-loop incrementality analysis that directly ties ad exposure to actual purchase behavior
The Bottom Line
In an advertising ecosystem increasingly focused on performance and accountability, this partnership delivers what brands need most: the confidence that comes from targeting audiences based on actual purchase behaviors rather than digital breadcrumbs.
The combination of PayPal Ads’s unmatched transaction intelligence and PubMatic’s premium programmatic platform creates advertising opportunities that drive real business outcomes while connecting brands with consumers who have already demonstrated genuine purchase intent in their categories.
For more information about accessing PayPal Ads’s audiences through PubMatic’s platform, contact your PubMatic representative or reach out to PayPalOffsiteAds@paypal.com.
1 Per Lucid brand lift study from July 2025
2 DISQO. (2025). 2025 Advertising Effectiveness Benchmarks: Brand Lift & Outcomes Lift Report – The only full-funnel, cross-platform normative benchmarks. DISQO
