How Google is adapting to cookie restrictions and data privacy
Apart from being a marketing platform, Google is also a digital marketing company that sells its own hardware, software, services and smart-home products. In that context the company is confronting the same privacy and data-constrained challenges that all digital marketers face: GDPR, CCPA, ITP.
Google has written a post that explains how the company itself is dealing with cookie-data and tracking challenges, trying to balance personalization and privacy. It’s designed to be instructive for other digital marketers.
There are three fundamental challenges Google outlines in this new privacy-sensitive environment:
- Audience targeting and list creation, with greater cookie and third party data restrictions
- Ad frequency: ensuring that ads are not shown too many times despite the lack of cookie data
- Ad performance and attribution with less available data
In response to these issues, Google says that it’s relying more heavily on first-party data. “When people show interest in certain products by visiting the Google Store’s website — and have given us consent where appropriate — we can use that data to inform the ads we show them in the future.”
It’s also using machine learning and predictive models to avoid over-exposing users to ads. It uses “traffic patterns where a third-party cookie is available, and analyzes them at an aggregated level across Google Ad Manager publishers . . . to create models to predict traffic patterns when a third-party cookie isn’t present.”
And when Google can’t “accurately determine someone’s interests and preferences to help personalize an ad,” it will use context to match ads to content. However, it says this isn’t like the AdSense of old; it’s more sophisticated.
Google also says that it has formed an internal team to focus on privacy, regulation and how future changes will impact the company’s marketing capabilities and tactics. “This team’s focus is forecasting the impact of each scenario on our campaigns and developing a game plan for how we would respond.”
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Anish
Digital Marketer, passionate about travel and adventure sports. Follow on Facebook Profile - https://www.facebook.com/anish.sudarsan/ & Instagram Profile - https://www.instagram.com/anishsudarsan/