Google's testing of interest-based advertising (IBA) when they rely on a combination of privacy-preserving signals has produced promising results.
The giant digital player's ads platforms, in the lead up to the end of cookies, conducted an experiment in the first quarter of 2023 to understand how interest-based audience solutions perform.
These signals included contextual information, the Topics API from the Privacy Sandbox and first-party identifiers such as Publisher Provided IDs.
The research did not compare the performance of third-party cookies to the Topics API alone, but rather a broader suite of signals available in a privacy-first world.
"We learned that interest-based audience solutions with privacy-preserving signals showed promise compared to third party cookies," says Dan Taylor, Google's VP Global Ads.
Google, after several delays, is looking at mid 2024 to end third party cookies. Advertisers and media agencies have been relying on third-party signals to finely target consumers.
The goal now is to find alternatives to cookies, balancing consumer privacy against personalisation in advertising.
Google's move has seen a surge in traditional media players, such as News Corp and Nine Entertainment, building their own first data capabilities via news site subscriptionn and by adding external data such as that held by Adobe and others.
The latest experiment showed that when using interest-based audience (IBA) solutions with privacy-preserving signals on the display network, Google Display Ads advertiser spending on IBA fell by 2%-7% compared to third-party-cookie-based results.
For conversions per dollar, the decrease was 1%-3%.
Click-through rates remained within 90% of the status quo with a similar performance for Display & Video 360.
The experiment also suggests that AI-powered optimisation solutions can positively impact campaign performance.
For example, campaigns using optimised targeting or maximise conversions bid strategies were less impacted by the removal of third-party cookies, indicating that machine learning can play a significant role in driving results.
"These results, while encouraging, should not be considered as an unequivocal indicator of Google’s IBA performance after the third-party cookie deprecation," says Taylor.
The current experiment measures the effectiveness of serving interest-based audiences; the results of future experiments including measurement, remarketing, and other use cases may vary.
"Our industry is at a crossroads where the future of digital advertising and the open internet as we know it is at stake," says Taylor.
"Some are turning to blocking personalised advertising outright — which can lead to more intrusive forms of tracking such as fingerprinting — while others are building alternative identifiers to track people across the web and apps.
"We believe that neither of these are good outcomes for user privacy and that ad tech platforms can set a new standard for privacy, meet consumers’ expectations, and give businesses the tools they need to grow through the power of innovation."
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