Understanding Google’s FLoC replacement Topics, and its unanswered questions

January 27, 2022

By Seb Joseph

There’s a new addition to Google’s plan for life after the third-party cookie: it’s called Topics, and it replaces one of the more controversial aspects of its original plan — Federated Learning of Cohorts. It works by identifying five topics that represent a person’s interests for that week based on their browsing history. To start, there are currently 350 available topics, although that will grow over time.

Google is pitching Topics as an upgrade on the much-maligned FloC. Less is revealed — the topics are controlled and the sharing of them is more restricted, it has claimed. How that translates into a utility for advertisers and publishers is anyone’s guess currently. Google’s initial reveal is light on details.

Here’s a rundown of some of the obvious, burning questions the industry is yet to get to the bottom of in understanding Google’s latest proposal for ad targeting sans third-party cookies.

Will Topics be good for brand advertisers?

If Google’s Topics’ announcement is taken at face value, the answer will be “no” it won’t be good for brand advertisers.

The kind of aggregate browsing labels that Topics will deliver will mostly not be relevant to brand advertisers’ goals, especially when it comes to reach and frequency. In particular, frequency reported could be a tough one to believe in if Google is only tracking users broadly based on topics of interest. Simply put, the approach seems a bit odd.

“Does Google seriously believe that the average person’s attention span only covers five topics in a week? In an average week, most users will think about work, eating out, entertainment, commuting, potentially about holidays, health and wellbeing,” said Farhad Divecha, md of digital marketing agency AccuraCast.

That’s six things already, and they’re all fairly wide and applicable to everyone today. Five topics will feel really limited and might preclude other topics being targetable — unless Google includes some mechanism to ignore the everyday topics and only focus on new topics of interest. Doing so could create a different set of problems for advertisers who want to target users based on those everyday topics, said Divecha.

Worse still, what happens when users turn off the feature?

Will there be truly no interest or topic-based information for advertisers, and subsequently no reach and frequency information for them to lean on either?

Topics’ Privacy Sandbox stablemate FLEDGE, or First Locally-Executed Decision over Groups Experiment, might have some answers. The feature is meant to support remarketing by letting someone’s browser, not the advertiser or ad tech platform, control the advertiser-defined interest groups associated with that browser. It’s possible the same mechanism may be used to track frequency. But Google hasn’t been clear if this is the case.

But surely this is an actual improvement over FLoCs, right?

Sort of. Topics works to block digital tracking cookies and instead focuses on the individual, rather than overall browsing history trends for groups of people. This allows for users to be more anonymous while also allowing for an easier way for …read more

Source:: Digiday

      

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