Google is going to roll out an approach to ad frequency control that doesn’t rely on cookies in Display & Video 360 over the coming weeks. The company said that it plans to bring it to Google Ads in the future.
This feature utilizes machine learning to analyze traffic patterns when third-party cooks are available and builds models in order to predict patterns when cookies aren’t present. “This allows us to estimate how likely it is for users to visit different publishers who are serving the same ads through Google Ad Manager. Then, when there is no third-party cookie present, we’re able to optimize how often those ads should be shown to users,” said Rahul Srinivasan, product manager for ads privacy at Google, in the announcement.
Cookies have been crumbling for a while now, and since they aren’t supported on mobile apps, Google and Facebook have been leading the shift towards using deterministic IDs of signed-in users.
This is also a response to Apple as well. Apple has been pushing against cookies and ad tracking with regular updates to its Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in Safari. The focus of ITP is to almost completely block the ability of advertisers and ad networks to use cookies. These cases coupled with advertisers and ad networks to use cookies. And coupled with privacy constraints of GDPR and the upcoming CCPA, a wrench has been thrown into the works that Google and many other entities in the digital advertising industry have been working within.
Google has been relying on models more and more in order to inform how ads are delivered when it can’t access data that it once counted on. But because of the massive volume of data that Google is able to collect along with significant investments in machine learning, that means that it can make do with less.
According to Google, it aggregates user data before applying its machine learning models, so no user-level data is shared across sites and relies on publishers’ first-party data.
Google even says that the feature “respects a user’s choice to opt out of third-party tracking.” Google and other digital advertising companies have long ignored Do Not Track.
Chrome announced changes to the way it is handling cookies and fingerprinting in May. It will start requiring developers to specify which cookies are able to work across sites and potentially used to track users.