Advertising plays an important role in helping publishers fund the content that people love to read, watch and play online. But it has become essential to evolve digital advertising practices to address people’s changing privacy expectations and keep online content accessible to everyone. We’re committed to helping publishers of all sizes navigate today’s privacy environment, and what lies ahead. With this in mind, today we’re sharing how we’re experimenting with new technologies to help our partners sustain advertising revenue as the web evolves.
People shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web in order to get the benefits of relevant advertising. That’s why, as we shared last week, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products once third-party cookies are phased out. We believe the Privacy Sandbox is critical to a privacy-first future for digital advertising — one that protects users while still delivering results for publishers and advertisers.
Over the past year, we’ve been teaming up with ecosystem partners to test new solutions, including privacy-preserving APIs that move away from tracking individuals across the web while maintaining advertising effectiveness. The great news is we don’t anticipate publishers will need to put in significant work to benefit from the Privacy Sandbox when it’s rolled out to the industry at large. Google Ad Manager and AdSense, for example, will use the public privacy-preserving APIs to build support for these solutions, so publishers don’t have to.
Activating first-party relationships
In addition to the Privacy Sandbox, we believe that publishers who have built first-party relationships with their audiences should be able to provide personalized ad experiences to those customers. That’s why we’re investing in — and empowering publishers to adopt — strategies that support those direct relationships.
Bringing first-party audiences to programmatic
When publishers have direct relationships with their audiences, they can use insights from those users’ interactions with their content to responsibly deliver relevant and helpful ads and earn more revenue.
Today, many large publishers with existing first-party data strategies are using Publisher Provided Identifiers (PPIDs) in Ad Manager to deliver personalized ad campaigns in a privacy-first way. This feature allows publishers to build custom audience segments, deliver campaigns via traditional reservations or Programmatic Guaranteed deals, and in turn, make more money.
To enable publishers to further increase their inventory’s value, we’re working to help them expand the use of their PPIDs to more programmatic campaign types, including the Open Auction. We’ve begun testing this functionality and look forward to reporting progress.
Enabling first-party data for publishers of all sizes
We’re also experimenting with a new feature that will help publishers of all sizes more easily access the benefits of their first-party data in Ad Manager. With minimal technical effort, the solution will enable publishers to activate data from user engagement on their own sites. This capability will help publishers, who choose to use it, increase programmatic demand and the value of their audiences. We will share more on this experiment later this year.
Respecting publishers’ trusted connections
We’ve long supported trusted, direct relationships between publishers and buyers and want to ensure our ad products continue to enable those connections in a secure way. Additionally, we aim to provide partners with the flexibility and choice to implement the monetization strategies that best support their business goals.
That’s why we’re experimenting with functionality that will provide publishers with the option to share encrypted signals directly with Authorized Buyers or Open Bidders with whom they already have a direct relationship. Publishers will have full control over what data is collected, and who can receive the signals. Google will not be able to read or decrypt the signals. Ad Manager will only act as an intermediary on behalf of the publisher to pass the signals to the third-party bidders they choose. We are currently testing this feature and look forward to sharing more details.
To maintain a vibrant and open publisher ecosystem that provides people with access to the diverse content they care about, we will continue to invest in technology that helps our partners succeed while protecting people’s privacy online. As we move forward in 2021, you can expect to hear more about how progress in the Privacy Sandbox can be applied to your business, as well as updates on the experiments we’ve shared today.
