Privacy Sandbox

Everyone loves a good challenge, but some are tougher to tackle than others. For marketers, the big one is the personalization paradox. 71% of consumers prefer personalized ad content, but 74% are also concerned about how advertisers are actually using their personal data. This creates a problem for marketers. They want to reach out to their customers with personalized content but often rely on tracking technologies that are considered invasive. Fortunately, there is an answer to this particular paradox. Brands can use data-driven strategy to leverage large anonymized datasets that provide rich personalization at scale without compromising on privacy.

The cookieless future is fast approaching, and this means that brands need to rebuild their marketing strategies around alternatives to third-party cookies. Navigating this new environment will require mastering a suite of tools, including another type of cookies: first-party cookies.

To understand how you can make the most of first-party cookies, let’s dive into what they are, how they work, and how advertisers use them.

On April 18th, Google published the results from Google Ads’ interest-based advertising testing, where, among other tools, Topics API was analyzed. We are happy that the Google Ads team joined RTB House and Criteo in openly publishing findings from experiments with Privacy Sandbox APIs.

In the report, the Google Ads team compares the effectiveness of applying Topics API, contextual signals, and publisher first-party IDs instead of cookies for Interest-Based Advertising (IBA). Third-party cookies were allowed in this experiment for use cases unrelated to targeting, such as frequency capping and measurement.

Despite their seemingly innocent name, cookies have found themselves at the heart of one of the internet’s biggest privacy revolutions. Specifically, third-party cookies have come under fire from privacy-advocacy groups, ultimately leading Google to work towards a cookieless future. This change will have significant implications for advertisers, as third-party cookies have been an essential targeting technology since their inception.

Let’s dive into the implications of Google’s decision and how you can prepare for the cookieless future.

The cookieless future is fast approaching. This decision by Google, sparked by very real privacy concerns, removes a key personalization capability for advertisers: third-party cookies. To counteract this, Google has been building a series of tools to replicate their functionality, and today we’re going to dive into one of them: Google Topics API.

As Chrome plans the deprecation of third-party cookies for early 2025, and the deadline is fast approaching, the AdTech ecosystem is in pressing need of a detailed plan of how the phase-out of third-party cookies will look. A clear schedule will help ensure efficient planning and coordination, allowing for a smooth transition to a stable, vibrant ad ecosystem based on Privacy Sandbox. To help achieve this clarity—and to initiate a wider discussion—in this blog post, we will propose what we believe is a viable next step after the 1% deprecation.