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Despite the protracted timeline for deprecating third-party cookies scheduled for next year, there is still little data to help marketers understand what that future might look like.
Google Ads is trying to add some clarity to this murky picture.
This week, Google released results of testing interest-based audience solutions, a suite of tools that are designed to be more privacy-safe than third-party cookies.
Essentially, the results found that these solutions only do a slightly worse job in scale, ad quality, and ad relevance than third-party cookies, digital advertising’s decades-old workhorse, which regularly offered inaccurate representations of real audiences online.
In a blog post, vp of Google Ads Dan Taylor called the results “encouraging.” A white paper that further details the findings notes that without third-party cookies, the internet will likely have coarser, less precise data signals. So, the fact the findings show just a slightly weaker performance than cookies might be promising.
Still, broadly, marketers are lagging in testing alternative IDs. Supply-side platforms aren’t testing Google Privacy Sandbox retargeting protocol Fledge (which Google renamed Protected Audience API this week), even though industry experts agree that it’s one of the more promising privacy tech solutions.
Crucially, the utility of the findings lies in the degree to which the industry trusts them.
The fact that Google has introduced Privacy Sandbox solutions like Topics into its browser, Chrome, and that this test was run by separate business units Google Ads and Demand & Video 360, has some people uneasy. Some are wary to take Google’s word that life without cookies will be just fine.
“I find these numbers unverifiable and heavily in Google’s interests,” said Robert Webster, global vp of strategy at marketing tech consultancy CvE. “We have still yet to see independent tests show such results.”
A Google spokesperson said that the company is committed to using the Privacy Sandbox and other privacy-preserving signals, so it makes sense for the company to test these signals just as any other ad-tech firm might.