Privacy Sandbox

We now know that third-party cookies will be staying with us a little longer. On June 24, Google released an updated timeline for the Privacy Sandbox – a high-level plan indicating that it will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three month period starting mid-2023.

The question is – how much more time does the industry actually have? The answer is – not much. Based on the official procedures for bringing new features to Chrome, we at RTB House expect that the next two years will be filled with work.

A year after the previous extension of the deadline for third-party cookies deprecation, Google did it again, this time until the second half of 2024 [Note: In April 2024, it was further postponed until early 2025]. At the same time, Google released two important pieces of information: The FLEDGE origin trial will most likely be extended until late October and will also cover Chrome stable users, and the feedback report for Q2, which is a result of the company’s commitments to the CMA.

In 2023 Google announced the depreciation of third-party cookies and began the development of the Google Privacy Sandbox. However, the deadline has once again been pushed back, this time to 2025]. The reason? “The need for more time to evaluate and test the new technologies.” Despite positive developments, RTB House’s own tests of the FLEDGE proposal, with nearly 8 million ads in 50 countries, have shown that there is still plenty of work to be done to build effective cookieless alternatives.

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.

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.

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.