[Video #3] How Much Will Your Bidding Efficiency Drop without 3rd-party Cookies?

Online advertisers and retailers deal in specific numbers and hard data. When you have millions of monthly site visitors, a fractional increase in conversion rates or average order volumes can bring significant value to business results.

The fear around the phasing out of 3rd-party cookies is that bidding efficacy will be severely impacted. Advertisers need assurances that their campaigns will still be performant, that results will be measurable, and that the upcoming change will not be disruptive to business. Thankfully, RTB House has been working on the answer to this problem and has the backing of WC3 and Google for our Outcome-based TURTLEDOVE proposal.

Find out more about how we are ensuring that bidding efficacy will be maintained in the 3rd video from our Cookieless Future series, hosted by our experts Laurie da Silva and Richard Johnson.

Last Updated:
Published:
[Full transcription below]

Laurie da Silva (00:00):

When Google announced they would be eliminating the use of cookies on their Chrome browser, advertisers wondered, “How much will my bidding efficiency drop?”

Richard Johnson (00:14):

With the introduction of cookies on the internet, real-time bidding allowed advertising inventory to be sold on a per-impression basis via an auction that takes place in milliseconds. This use of measurement optimization and targeting based on conversion rates and viewability allowed advertisers to be much more targeted and cost-efficient than anything used in the past.

Laurie da Silva (00:36):

But what happens if you take away that small amount of coding that makes all of this work, the cookie? When Google announced they would be eliminating the use of cookies on their Chrome browser, advertisers wondered, “How much will my bidding efficiency drop?”

Richard Johnson (00:51):

The answer, according to a number of simulations, is very little; certainly not enough to be noticed by marketers. Today, the calculating efficacy and bidding strategy attached to 3rd-party cookies is used as a cross-site tracking mechanism for the individual user. In the future, however, the bidding strategy will switch to groups, whose collective attributes will be stored in an individual’s device and made accessible to advertisers during the bidding time.

Laurie da Silva (01:17):

Subsidiary technologies to 3rd-party cookies are also an option in the future. Here, product recommendations are used to build user profiles utilizing the data the individual consents to give.

Richard Johnson (01:30):

But for the most part, advertisers will need to switch from an individual to a cohort or interest group approach. But how can you do that while keeping your current level of advertising efficacy?

Laurie da Silva (01:43):

What was needed was a new solution, and that’s just what RTB House developed, which was warmly welcomed by the W3C Group and Google, who made it part of their privacy sandbox. Known as Outcome-based TURTLEDOVE, it will save information in the user’s browser when that user visits an advertiser’s website. This data is stored directly on the user’s device, and will not be accessible to external companies. As a result, this new tool will allow advertisers to keep their user level bidding efficacy while maintaining a group-based approach to privacy guarantees.

Richard Johnson (02:18):

It also allows variables to stay on the user’s device to help future bidding strategies, and it adds additional mathematical privacy guarantees against fingerprinting. This will prevent any abuse of keeping these variables on the user’s device.

Laurie da Silva (02:34):

Just how important will this Outcome-based TURTLEDOVE be to bidding efficacy once Chrome becomes cookie-less? Consider this; without it, the bids for all users in a given group would be the same. But when used during bidding, you’ll be allowed to use the on-device variables to increase your bidding efficacy.

Richard Johnson (02:55):

You can find more detailed information about increasing your bidding efficacy in the cookie-less world at blog.rtbhouse.com. Thanks for watching.