Privacy Sandbox

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.

Consumer tech companies, like Samsung, operate in an environment with high average order values (AOVs) but long gaps between conversions. This means it is essential to maximize individual sales and build brand loyalty that lasts long after a purchase is complete. Companies can best do this by building direct connections with their customers across a variety of sales channels. However, this means overcoming the challenges posed by the loss of access to third-party cookies in the oncoming cookieless future.

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.

As a leading buy-side platform, RTB House has been involved in the development of the Privacy Sandbox ever since its announcement. Being highly experienced in retargeting, we put particular emphasis on FLEDGE. This proposal has been in preparation for years now and has been available for testing in Chrome since April 2022.

We already shared our initial findings from the experiments in a previous article. It covered the availability of the elements for testing, our setups, and the initial results.

In this article, we would like to provide an update on the status of both the market and RTB House as of the end of January, give more insights and results, and share our perspective on the future testing and implementation phases.

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.