With third-party cookies being phased out, today, Google explicitly said that it won’t develop or support any alternatives to replace them with another user-level identifier. This means the end of cross-site, individualized web ad tracking and targeting on the open web using Google platforms.
“We will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products,” said David Temkin, Google’s Director of Product Management, Ads Privacy and Trust, in a blog post.
Instead of cookies, Google will rely on the cohort-based targeting mechanism it has developed called FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts).
With FLoC, thousands of Chrome users are grouped into cohorts based on each individual’s browsing behavior. The browser uses machine learning algorithms to develop cohorts and shapes them by the sites each person visits. This includes site URLs, page content and more. Over time, the browser updates the cohort as each user travels the web and their behavior changes.
All of these behavioral inputs are kept locally, in the user’s browser, and aren’t uploaded elsewhere else. The browser only exposes the total cohort, though each cohort is well distributed to represent thousands of people.
The goal here is privacy, without losing interest-based ad-targeting. Chrome will group people together with similar browsing habits, allowing ad tech companies, advertisers and publishers to observe the habits of large groups instead of the activity of individuals, and target them accordingly.
Given the amount of time and effort Google has devoted to its Privacy Sandbox and development of FLoC, the idea that it would issue a replacement for individualized cookie-based ad tracking never seemed like a real possibility.
According to Temkin’s blog post, “Advances in aggregation, anonymization, on-device processing and other privacy-preserving technologies offer a clear path to replacing individual identifiers. In fact, our latest tests of FLoC show one way to effectively take third-party cookies out of the advertising equation and instead hide individuals within large crowds of people with common interests. Chrome intends to make FLoC-based cohorts available for public testing through origin trials with its next release this month, and we expect to begin testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads in Q2.”
While FLoC will replace third-party identifiers for cross-site tracking through Google platforms, Google will allow advertisers to target individuals using first-party data that they own.
“Developing strong relationships with customers has always been critical for brands to build a successful business, and this becomes even more vital in a privacy-first world,” said Temkin. “We will continue to support first-party relationships on our ad platforms for partners, in which they have direct connections with their own customers. And we’ll deepen our support for solutions that build on these direct relationships between consumers and the brands and publishers they engage with.”
The first-party callout is also key for Google and its own properties. While Google won’t allow individualized targeting and tracking on the open web, advertisers can still target and track one-to-one using Google’s own first-party data across Google services like YouTube, Google Search and Gmail — a move many see as anti-competitive but being sold as privacy-centric.
“The most important unsaid thing in this post is that Google will continue to use user identity to their hearts’ content inside of their walled garden,” says Paul Bannister, Chief Strategy Officer at CafeMedia.
Google’s decision to disavow user-level identifiers creates problems for companies that have focused on developing cookie alternatives, most notably, The Trade Desk with Unified ID 2.0. Temkin’s blog post bluntly called these alternatives out.
“We realize this means other providers may offer a level of user identity for ad tracking across the web that we will not — like PII graphs based on people’s email addresses,” he said. “We don’t believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions, and therefore aren’t a sustainable long term investment.”
While Google won’t support the use of UID 2.0 or other cookie alternatives across its ad-buying platforms, advertisers and publishers can still leverage them elsewhere.
This could be a massive opportunity for independent, open web ad platforms, says Beeswax’s Ari Paparo. “This is good news for independent ad tech, as they have a tool that Google won’t use.” Paparo goes on to say that The Trade Desk’s “biggest competitor is now playing with one arm behind its back.”
However, it remains to be seen whether or not Google could seek to limit the use of UID 2.0 and other cross-site identity solutions in its Chrome browser. Victory Medium’s Zach Edwards says it’s very likely, at some point, that “Chrome will remove side channels that facilitate cross-website tracking & Google won’t support new tracking IDs.”
