Topics, the journey to Google’s third party cookies replacement
By Zion Rufus
Amidst the growing agitation for stronger user privacy and Internet security, Google has introduced Topics, its latest third-party cookies replacement and a Privacy Sandbox proposal for a mechanism to enable interest-based advertising, without having to resort to tracking the sites a user visits.
How did we get here?
In 2020, Google sent the digital marketing and advertising world into a frenzy when it announced the phasing out of third-party cookies in Chrome.
Meanwhile, the Big Tech shared that it was working with the broader industry on the Privacy Sandbox to build innovations that protect anonymity while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers.
For a fact, cookies are a necessary part of the modern web, but they can also pose a considerable risk of invasion of privacy as well as a security risk to the websites that use them.
Owing to that fact and becoming altogether more chaotic, the past two years saw an increased focus on user privacy across all platforms. On one hand, Apple had been announcing industry-stirring privacy policies to the horror of digital marketers and advertisers who relied on third party data and cookies for their ad tracking and targeting. On the other hand, Google’s third-party-cookies phaseout hinders gathering of tracking data.
Where Apple sternly saw privacy as a fundamental human right, Google believed that preserving privacy and performance will protect the future of advertising. These increasing privacy policies began to threaten how well digital advertising performs. Although the elimination of these cookies will increase user privacy and security, it will also pose a big challenge for consumer tracking and ad serving firms, as marketers may no longer be able to track potential customers, retarget users, and even lose revenue as a result of the overall alteration.
So It must have been hard to imagine how advertising on the web could have stayed relevant, and accurately measured, without third-party cookies because across the globe, the ad industry began to seek out alternatives in 2021.
The alternatives, which include The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 and Lotame’s Panorama ID, became the go-to for ad giants such as Publicis, Interpublic Group, Omnicom, as well as publishers like AMC, Maven, The Washington Post, and Newsweek amongst others.
Setting fire to the cookie
For so long, Google has been considered an unmatched leader in online advertising as it continues to sit as the world’s most popular and widely used search engine.
Fielding more than 3.5 billion search queries every single day, Google offers advertisers access to an unprecedented and unequaled potential audience of users who are actively looking for goods and services. The conversion tracking feature of Google Ads also uses cookies. To help marketers and advertisers track sales and other conversions from ads, campaigns, and free listings.
Hence, for decades digital advertisers and marketers have relied heavily on the use of third-party cookies to track online users, target them with personalized advertisements, compile records of users’ browsing history, and build up a profile of their interests, preferences and habits. It has also been pivotal to the way marketers measure the impact of their campaigns.
Third-party cookies have continuously played an integral role in the digital advertising industry. The cookies store user data to help improve user experience on a website while tracking user-activity online and serving targeted ads. These hyper-targeted ads are very valuable, resulting in the creation of an ad industry whereby individual user data is proliferated across thousands of companies.
Google tried to bake a new cookie
Maintaining its path to eliminate third-party cookies, Google moved to replace them with viable privacy-first alternatives, developed alongside ecosystem partners, that will help publishers and advertisers succeed while also protecting people’s privacy as they move across the web. Owing to this, the tech giant last year released Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a new way for businesses to reach people with relevant content and ads by clustering large groups of people with similar interests. The new cookie-replacement approach effectively hides individuals in the crowd and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser.
Encouraged by results which indicated that when it came to generating interest-based audiences, FLoC could provide an effective replacement signal for third-party cookies, Google shared that its tests of FLoC to reach in-market and affinity Google Audiences showed that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising.
Confident, Google said: “Technology advancements such as FLoC, along with similar promising efforts in areas like measurement, fraud protection and anti-fingerprinting, are the future of web advertising — and the Privacy Sandbox will power our web products in a post-third-party cookie world.”
However, on the premise that the web ecosystem would be at risk if privacy practices do not keep up with changing expectations, Google announced Topics API.
Now that we are here
According to Google The Topics API proposes a way to provide topics that a user might currently be interested in, based on their recent browsing activity. These topics can supplement contextual information to help select appropriate advertisements.
The Topics API will help facilitate robust user controls, as the API is built on top of recognizable, high-level topics. Chrome plans to offer users the option to remove individual topics, and to show the user the topics stored in the browser.
In the same vein, the Topics API will calculate the top topics for a user based on their recent browsing activity; provide a JavaScript API to provide topics currently of interest to the user, to help enable the selection of appropriate ads; and as well map website hostnames to topics of interest.
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