On July 22nd, Google made the announcement that they are retracting their initiative to deprecate third-party cookies. Google is instead opting to give users the ability to make informed decisions on how they share their data with the ability to decline third-party cookies entirely through their Privacy Sandbox platform. While this is a big change in direction from Google’s initial stance, it does not change the fact that performance marketers will need to continue to pivot in the face of a changing, privacy-focused digital landscape.
With users being more intentional in how they share their data with advertisers and with digital privacy legislations, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law, the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA), the Colorado Privacy Act (CPA), and a multitude of other state legislations in the US regarding digital privacy and data protection, the ability to adapt your advertising strategies to comply is more important than ever. You can read more about third-party cookie deprecation and its effects in Jeff Kramer’s blog on the subject, written before this announcement: The End of an Era – Say Goodbye to Google’s Third-Party Cookies.
These changes can be concerning if you advertise on the Google platform. While there still is a level of uncertainty in how these changes will affect your campaigns, Google is developing solutions through its Privacy Sandbox initiative. This initiative aims to ensure accurate targeted advertising and conversion tracking while maintaining data privacy standards that protect users on their platform. If you are unsure, here are three reasons why advertising with Google is still worth doing, even without cookies.
1. Privacy Conscious Ad Targeting
To put it simply, consumers are getting more and more savvy about how they share their personal information and data online. They are growing more distrustful and unsatisfied with platforms and products that track them and use their harvested data for targeted advertising.
To accommodate this growing demand for data privacy, Google has launched Topics API and Protected Audience API. These features attempt to allow for targeted advertising in a way that anonymizes and protects sensitive user data while still enabling advertisers to market to their target audience and individuals who have interacted with their brand.
Topics API works by labeling websites in relation to the topics or interests the website covers. Your web browser stores this data internally on your device and only shares with Google that your browser activity indicates that you’re interested in that topic. This allows advertisers to show users targeted ads related to those topics without the user sharing any browsing history or personal information other than their interest in these high-level topics.
These topics are human-curated and publicly available and do not include personal or sensitive categories, such as race, sexual orientation, or religion. The topics that you share with Google can be seen within your browser settings and can be removed individually or turned off entirely, giving users more control over what information they share, if any at all. Through these features, campaigns can still be optimized through user interest signals without having to receive and send sensitive user data.
Protected Audience API works in a similar way, allowing web developers to configure their sites to assign users to specific interest groups that can be used to serve advertisements to. Neither the website nor Google receive any data outside of the fact that your web browser was added to that interest group, further protecting user data by washing out identifying factors and lumping this data into a larger pool rather than tracking on an individual level. This will allow advertisers to still operate effective remarketing campaigns without the platform needing to track and harvest data on an individual level.
2. Power Through First-Party Data
Another powerful tool worth considering is the use of first-party data in Google Ads. If you run an online business, it is very likely that you are sitting on a mountain of customer data, insights, and conversion data. If you are not leveraging that first-party data by feeding it into Google Ads, you’re missing out on many opportunities to accurately track purchasing and lead data and further connect to and expand your current customer base.
With third-party cookies becoming less and less of a factor, learning to utilize your first-party data is more important than ever. Assuming your data was collected with the user’s consent, this is a privacy-forward solution that can enhance your Google advertising strategy for both e-commerce and lead-generation applications.
One way is to use Google’s Customer Match feature. With Customer Match, you can submit a list of customer data, which will allow Google to match these data points to Google accounts on their platform. With this list of matched users, you can continue to connect and provide value to existing users by running remarketing campaigns to previous customers or individuals who have recently interacted with your business.
This list can also be used to provide signals to Google that detail the demographic information and interests of your customers, giving them the information they need to target groups of people who are similar to your ideal customers. As this is entirely based on Google’s own account data, this is a privacy-forward solution that only sends consensually given data directly to Google without being passed on to any middlemen.
You can read more about Customer Match here: Unlocking Growth: How Customer Match Can Supercharge Your Digital Marketing Strategy by Cary Goldstein.
If you are a lead-based service business, you likely rely on a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, like Hubspot, to organize customer leads and track and manage your sales cycle from initial contact to the final sale. With rising concerns about how conversion tracking on Google Ads will function with decreased use of third-party cookies, this internal data is vital to measuring the success of your advertising campaigns and making data-driven decisions on how to move forward. Thankfully, Google makes it easy to directly import this data into your Google Ads account. This allows you to associate the performance of your ads directly with your internal conversion data, ensuring accurate and privacy-compliant performance attribution. As a result, you get the information you need to optimize your marketing without any guesswork.
Similar to Customer Match, this first-party conversion data can also be used in your campaigns that utilize automated bidding strategies to bid higher to pursue the exact kind of customers that are ideal for your business based on your lead and conversion data. You can read more about this process in Dain Ferrero’s blog post: Lead-Gen Advertising & How To Get Quality Leads.
3. Visibility on the World’s Largest Ad Platform
It is no secret that Google is the largest player in the search engine game. After all, everybody “Googles” the things they look up online. According to Hubspot, Google maintains about 92% of the search engine market share across all users and accounts for nearly two trillion searches a year. That is a lot of users in front of a lot of ad real estate, presenting an incredible amount of opportunities for your business to be seen in front of your target audience.
In an article written by Clutch, it is reported that people are four times more likely to click on an ad on the Google search page than they are to click on an ad on any other platform. Google is in the business of answering questions and solving problems, and if your potential customer comes online with a search query for what you offer, Google Ads will give them the path of least resistance from their initial search to your opportunity to earn their business.
Not only do you have exposure to users making online searches, but you also have the ability to reach billions of YouTube and Gmail users and access an immeasurable number of web touchpoints through Google’s Display Network.
Despite the uncertain future of digital tracking, Google Ads remains a powerful and viable advertising tool. By leveraging privacy-conscious ad targeting methods like Topics API and Protected Audience API, businesses can continue to reach their target audiences while respecting user privacy. Additionally, harnessing first-party data through features like Customer Match and CRM integration enables more precise and effective advertising strategies, ensuring you stay connected with your customers and drive conversions.
Finally, the sheer reach and visibility of Google’s vast ad network offer unmatched opportunities for exposure, making Google Ads an indispensable part of your digital marketing arsenal. Embracing these strategies will not only help you navigate the evolving digital landscape but also position your business for sustained success in a privacy-focused future.
