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FLoC is for the birds. Today, Google unveiled a new targeting proposal for advertisers that isn’t reliant on third-party cookies. Called Topics, it will replace the Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC.
Reminder: Google says it’s going to get rid of those pesky third-party cookies in Chrome by 2023. In the meantime, it’s testing alternatives.
- FLoC effectively segmented audiences into categories (or “cohorts”) based on browsing activity. For instance, Mets fans might be placed in one cohort, while avid bakers would be put in another, making it possible for advertisers to target users based on their interests instead of tracking them individually.
Topics is basically a simplified version of FLoC, with measures taken to prevent “fingerprinting,” or advertiser attempts to target individuals despite efforts to anonymize users.
Here’s how it works: Based on a user’s browsing history, Google will assign individual users three topics that publishers and advertisers can then use to target them. These could range from fitness, to travel, to even rock music. Google says that Topics will “be curated to exclude sensitive categories,” like gender and race.
- Out of the gate, Google has roughly 300 topics for testing, which could grow to the low thousands.
- Every three weeks, old topics are automatically deleted. Google says it’s working on letting users remove specific topics, or turning off the feature entirely.
- As of now, users can’t pick their own topics, which many will find unhelpful ahead of Valentine’s Day.
So, with Topics, sites will see—and only see— a user’s three topics, triggering the mechanisms to serve them the most relevant advertisement based on that topic.
The proposal is still in the “early stages” of development and a test trial is beginning, according to Ben Galbraith, senior product director at Google. This trial will give advertisers a sense of how effective Topics will be compared to third-party cookies.
“With Topics, we’re looking for a sweet spot that is a meaningful improvement for user privacy but also provides a useful signal,” he said. “We’re looking forward to feedback from the ecosystem and from the trials to assess other people’s views and how effective this ultimately is.”
Related, unrelated: Google’s been in some hot water recently. Yesterday, Washington, DC, filed a lawsuit that accuses Google of “deceiving and manipulating consumers to gain access to their location data.” Plus, a newly unredacted lawsuit claims Google misled publishers and advertisers about its ad auctions 😬.—RB