3rd-party Cookies

As a new year dawns, many of us are looking toward 2023 with trepidation. A potent cocktail of skyrocketing inflation, a looming recession, and general global instability has created a difficult environment for companies in almost every industry. However, things aren’t as bad as they seem, and if companies can take advantage of the evolving MarTech trends, they can thrive despite the adversity.

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.

This article aims to complete the round of quality tests performed on the sampled Seller-Defined Audiences signals we received from the sell side. While the previous article investigated contextual SDAs, this one will focus on user SDAs and verify how they reflect reality. The tests in this section varied from the ones performed on the contextual signals as the nature of the user type differs. The first test relied on a manual check of an assignment mechanism, while the second one was based on a survey campaign.

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.

Google has released an article announcing the availability of Bidding and Auction services in the web version of FLEDGE, as well as the status on pending FLEDGE capabilities. These two Google releases could have a major impact on the adoption of FLEDGE in the near future.