Melanie Valenzia,

Market Research Analyst Intern
Fact: I try to walk 10,000 steps a day

John Michael,

Data Science Intern
Fact: I have a passion for science

ABOUT ONEST  

In a world where consumers have become much more careful about what they share online, trust has become a crucial component to maintain a digital ecosystem that works efficiently and effectively. However, today’s advertising practices put the confidence of privacy and security of their users at risk. According to Pew Research Center study, 72% of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms or other companies, and 81% say that the potential risks they face because of data collection outweigh the benefits.

Taking this into account, Google Chrome has announced a new Privacy Sandbox that aims to phase out the third-party cookies to help publishers and advertisers succeed while also protecting people’s privacy without tracking them. The Google Chrome products will be empowered by the privacy-preserving support advertising engine called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which will perform behavioural targeting without third-party cookies. The new appliance will allow users to be assigned to cohorts, which collects similar browsing behaviours to define clusters. These are homogenous user cohorts that preserve anonymity when applied to any dataset representing users and their interests, so users can be pseudonymously identified for relevant ads as particular groups. 

Conversion tracking is an important element of a PPC strategy and without the ability to track user behaviour, marketers will have less of an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of their campaign or advert. Moreover, using a cohort system may lead users to receive less relevant ads, which in turn would compromise important KPIs like click-through-rates or returning visitors. However, Google has reported that FLoC cohorts will be re-calculated weekly using data from the previous week’s browsing. This would reveal more potent measures of how users behave over a longer period and may allow marketers to build more of a long-term strategy.

Looking Forward 

Google claims that the current test runs of FLoC show that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising. Although this sounds very promising, we need to await the results of other tools in the Privacy Sandbox to fully understand its efficiency and further capabilities. Furthermore, there is more to be understood about how FLoC will handle direct campaign performance measurements. 

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) are also undergoing an investigation into these changes after it received several complaints about how this new way of handling data could impact competition.

Despite this, Google has stated that they are “more confident than ever that the Privacy Sandbox is the best path forward to improve privacy for web users while ensuring publishers can earn what they need to fund great content and advertisers can reach the right people for their products”.