People are increasingly concerned about their digital privacy, and they want to know how their personal information is being used. These shifts challenge Google to innovate and deliver relevant and effective display ads in ways that improve user trust. We believe that such changes should happen without disrupting the user experience or creating additional work for advertisers.
The framework we’ve built for Google audiences and measurement enables us to lean more on existing signals, but we’ve also been building tools for the Privacy Sandbox that incorporate new signals.
For example, Chrome recently announced the Topics API, which we’ll be testing with advertising partners throughout this year. With Topics, a user’s browser determines a handful of categories that represent the user’s top interests, such as “Fitness” or “Travel & Transportation,” then stores the topics locally on their device. When the user visits a participating site, Topics picks just three categories — one from each of the past three weeks — to share with the site and its advertising partners.
This represents an additional input we can use to power interest-based audiences. For example, if you currently use display ads to reach an affinity audience like “outdoor enthusiasts,” your campaigns will continue running smoothly as we update our technology.
Last year we ran our first experiment with select display advertisers and interest-based audiences without using third-party cookies. This year we are committed to expanding similar experiments across a wider range of targeting and measurement features, and with a broader set of businesses. We will continue to test and tune new versions of our products, in partnership with advertisers, to deliver both privacy and performance.
