Google's strategy for Ad-Targeting without third party cookies

Introduction

As web browsers part out third-party cookies, online advertisers search for new methods to focus on adverts to prospects without counting on present monitoring strategies. The transfer from third-party cookies comes amid rising client require stronger knowledge privacy protections. Tech firms have confronted elevated scrutiny over dealing with personal knowledge, with practices like extremely focused behavioral promoting elevating moral questions. Phasing out third-party cookies goals to curb the fixed monitoring of people throughout the web. Advertisers have combined opinions relating to the tip of third-party cookies concentrating on. On one hand, it might impression digital advert revenues. Alternatively, different concentrating on and measurement approaches could fill the void. 

Google's Plan

Google is expanding first-party data capabilities like Customer Match to allow personalized ad targeting based on advertisers’ customer data. New options like PAIR allow the first-party data to be used on external publishing sites. Google encourages advertisers to adopt these AI tools and first-party data capabilities to prepare for the cookie phase-out.

Google’s vision for a cookie-less future involves using on-device machine learning to analyze users’ browsing history and assign them to large groups or cohorts of people with similar interests. These cohorts are identified by anonymous IDs that are shared with websites and advertisers, instead of personal data or third-party cookies. This way, users can see relevant ads based on their cohort, without revealing their individual behavior.

Google calls this approach Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), and it is part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative, which aims to develop new standards and tools for web privacy and advertising. The Privacy Sandbox also includes other proposals, such as the Protected Audience API, the Topics API, and the Attribution Reporting API, to address various use cases and challenges in the online advertising ecosystem.

Google claims that FLoC can preserve privacy by only exposing users’ cohort, not their actual browsing history. It also says that FLoC can provide comparable results to third-party cookies in terms of ad relevance and conversion. However, FLoC has faced criticism and opposition from various stakeholders, including privacy advocates, regulators, publishers, and competitors, who have raised concerns about its potential impact on user choice, competition, and innovation.

FLoC is currently being tested by Google in Chrome, but it is not yet a web standard. It still needs to undergo further evaluation and feedback from the web community, as well as regulatory approval in some regions.

Conclusion

Although concentrating on precision could lower after phasing out third-party cookies, developments in first-party knowledge use and AI optimization provide options.

Google expects to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome by 2024, once FLoC and other Privacy Sandbox solutions are ready and adopted by the industry.