Google: Interest-Based Audience Ads Perform Nearly As Well As Third-Party Cookie Ads

Google: Interest-Based Audience Ads Perform Nearly As Well As Third-Party Cookie Ads
Tom Fogden
By Tom Fogden



Google has been testing digital ad solutions without third-party cookies and the results seem to be promising.

“In the first quarter of 2023, Google’s ads platforms conducted an experiment to understand how our interest-based audience (IBA) solutions perform when they rely on a combination of privacy-preserving signals,” explained Dan Taylor, the company’s vice president of global ads.

“These signals included contextual information, the Topics API from the Privacy Sandbox and first-party identifiers such as Publisher Provided IDs. Our research did not compare the performance of third-party cookies to the Topics API alone, but rather a broader suite of signals available in a privacy-first world.”

Using interest-based audience solutions that cover affinity, in-market, custom audiences and demographic segments on Google’s display network, in combination with privacy-preserving signals, Google found that return on investment decreased, though not as much as ad cost, and that click-through rates remained high.

Specifically, Google Display Ads advertiser spending on IBA decreased by between two and seven per cent compared to third-party cookie results. The conversion per dollar amount, as a proxy for return on investment, decreased by between one and three per cent.

Click-through rates, meanwhile, remained “within 90 per cent of the status quo.” Google said it also saw similar performance on Display & Video 360 ads.

Taylor added that while the experiment suggested that AI-powered optimisation can improve campaign performance, campaigns using optimised targeting or Maximise conversions bid strategies were less impacted by the removal of third-party cookies. This indicated that machine learning could play a significant role in driving results.

However, the results “should not be considered as an unequivocal indicator of Google’s IBA performance after the third-party cookie deprecation.”

Despite that, Taylor saw fit to throw some scorn on rival technologies being touted as alternatives to third-party cookies.

“Some are turning to blocking personalized advertising outright — which can lead to more intrusive forms of tracking such as fingerprinting — while others are building alternative identifiers to track people across the web and apps,” he said.

“We believe that neither of these are good outcomes for user privacy and that ad tech platforms can set a new standard for privacy, meet consumers’ expectations, and give businesses the tools they need to grow through the power of innovation.”

Google also said that it will continue to iterate and run more rounds of testing ahead of the death knell on third-party cookies finally tolls.




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