With so much up in the air right now, advertisers are focused on what they do know — Google will remove cookies from its dominant browser sometime next year bar a major u-turn. Whatever advertisers’ beliefs are about how the industry has responded to this deadline, they’re slowly waking up to the idea that the answer — or at least part of it — rests on their ownership of first-party data in the absence of third-party data they’d usually get from cookies. 

”I don’t know a single publisher or marketer that doesn’t have the “cookieless future” as a top priority right now,” said John Lee, corporate chief strategy officer at Merkle and president of the agency’s identity resolution platform Merkury. “The upcoming changes have gone from theoretical to very real and marketers are now starting to determine their plans to test various cookieless identity technologies [in 2021].”

That said, advertisers have been content to stick with what they know —Google. Six in ten (64%) of ad buyers have used Google for identity resolution at some point over the last 12 months, per a survey of 302 marketers and agency execs conducted by Advertiser Perceptions. Still, marketers know better than to put all their eggs in the Google basket.

Google is planning to eliminate third-party cookies in its Chrome browser by 2022, which sounds like a good thing for consumers worried about privacy. However, UK’s competition regulator has announced that its investigating the changes, out of concern that advertising dollars could “become even more concentrated on Google’s ecosystem at the expense of its competitors.”

To increase privacy while still allowing personalized ads, Google introduced something called the Privacy Sandbox project back in 2019. The aim is to banish third-party cookies that allow for bot fraud and fingerprinting that can track you across the internet. Those would be replaced by “trust tokens” that would still let advertisers provide relevant ads without tying the data to an individual.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it found in a recent study that “[Google] could undermine the ability of publishers to generate revenue and undermine competition in digital advertising, entrenching Google’s market power.” It also said that it has received complaints from a group representing newspaper publishers and technology companies, alleging that Google may be “abusing its dominant position.”

Chrome is developing a Privacy Sandbox feature that will prevent tracking cookies from following you between websites – and it's coming soon.

We're now seeing the first fruits of those efforts, with signs of a new Privacy Sandbox feature in Chrome Canary (an unstable early release intended for developers and anyone who wants to get a peek at features in progress).

As Techdows reports, the Privacy Sandbox is now visible as a Chrome Flag (a switch that allows you to activate experimental features), but it's not yet functional and is currently just a placeholder.

As we all know now, the Justice Department filed an anti-trust lawsuit against Google, saying that its business practices are harmful to users and competitors. The lawsuit said, “By restricting competition in search, Google’s conduct has harmed consumers by reducing the quality of search (including on dimensions such as privacy, data protection, and use of consumer data), lessening choice in search, and impeding innovation.”

Google has prepared for the moment by taking very visible steps to show that it respects consumer privacy. For example, Google launched an ad disclosure schema to make it possible for consumers to see all the cookies tracking them on Chrome. Google’s aim: make a public record of its efforts to respect privacy. Meanwhile, Google will continues to push the boundaries of privacy. I find it interesting that consumers can launch “People Cards” that allow them to create their own knowledge panel – which of course makes it easier for Google to learn something about them and serve up more personalized ads. And consumers are doing the heavy lifting to create the cards!

So, can you trust VPN by Google One to protect your privacy?

Privacy-focused ProtonVPN (operated by Proton Technologies, who also run ProtonMail) does not believe so. The company released a passionate call to resist VPN by Google One and reject Google's advances in the VPN sector.

"VPNs have long been essential online tools that provide security, freedom, and, most importantly, privacy. Each day, hundreds of millions of internet users connect to a VPN to prevent their online activities from being tracked and monitored so that they can privately access web resources. In other words, the very purpose of a VPN is to prevent the type of surveillance that Google engages in on a massive and unprecedented scale."

Strong words from ProtonVPN. But for many privacy advocates, they hit the nail on the head. On countless occasions, Google has shown that privacy will eventually fall to the wayside in search of profit and greater market control.

By applying Google’s advanced machine learning models, the new Analytics can automatically alert you to significant trends in your data – like products seeing rising demand because of new customer needs. It even helps you anticipate future actions your customers may take. For example, it calculates churn probability so you can more efficiently invest in retaining customers at a time when marketing budgets are under pressure. We’re continuing to add new predictive metrics, like the potential revenue you could earn from a particular group of customers. This allows you to create audiences to reach higher value customers and run analyses to better understand why some customers are likely to spend more than others, so you can take action to improve your results.

The new Analytics gives you customer-centric measurement, instead of measurement fragmented by device or by platform. It uses multiple identity spaces, including marketer-provided User IDs and unique Google signals from users opted into ads personalization, to give you a more complete view of how your customers interact with your business. For example, you can see if customers first discover your business from an ad on the web, then later install your app and make purchases there.

You’ll also get a better understanding of your customers across their entire lifecycle, from acquisition to conversion and retention. This is critical when people’s needs are rapidly changing and you have to make real-time decisions in order to win – and keep – new customers. Based on your feedback, we simplified and re-organized reporting so you can intuitively find marketing insights based on the part of the customer journey you’re interested in. For example, you can see what channels are driving new customers in the user acquisition report, then use the engagement and retention reports to understand the actions these customers take, and whether they stick around, after converting.

The world’s largest video site recently started asking creators to use YouTube software to tag and track products featured in their clips. The data will then be linked to analytics and shopping tools from parent Google.

The goal is to convert YouTube’s bounty of videos into a vast catalog of items that viewers can peruse, click on and buy directly, according to people familiar with the situation. The company is also testing a new integration with Shopify Inc. for selling items through YouTube.

Similar to other platforms, including Facebook and TikTok, Google has created new advertising and ecommerce tools targeted at small- and medium-sized businesses. One feature to be added soon is in-store sales measurement and smart bidding, which uses machine learning to optimize bids based on specific KPIs. Advertisers will be able to upload first-party sales data to assist in targeting people who would be most likely to make purchases.

The platform is also adding functionality that will show online shoppers where and when they can get items that are out of stock. And businesses will be able to add specific information in Google search and on their profile pages, including whether takeout, curbside pickup, in-store shopping and no-contact delivery is offered.

The home furnishings retailer is deploying a range of platform solutions from Google Cloud as it looks to further personalize the shopping experience for customers, enhance fulfillment capacity, and optimize merchandise planning and demand forecasting. The company will implement Google Cloud technologies including BigQuery, Spanner, Google Compute Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine, to establish a singular view of customer data across its portfolio of brands. Deloitte will serve as strategic transformation services partner. 

Bed Bath & Beyond will utilize Google Cloud BigQuery to grow its machine learning and analytics capabilities, in an initiative designed to enhance the ability to project future sales trends and, based on those projections, make instant, customer-centric decisions with real-time data. As a result, the company hopes to better serve the market with improved demand prediction and optimized inventory and merchandise planning. 

In addition, Bed Bath & Beyond wants to create a highly personalized, “omni-always” shopping experience with a more agile and predictive e-commerce platform. To that end, it will deploy Google Cloud AI solutions to support the entire shopping experience, from search navigation and checkout to delivery or pickup. The rollout is designed to provide enhanced fulfillment capabilities at a massive scale to optimize every aspect of the business, from demand forecasting to supply chain/logistics and the customer experience. 

Google today launched Chrome 85 for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS. Chrome 85 brings tab management changes, 10% faster page loads, PDF improvements, and a slew of developer features. You can update to the latest version now using Chrome’s built-in updater or download it directly from google.com/chrome.

Google is proposing a separate solution: trust tokens. They’re “smart” iterations of cookies that will validate your access to a specific website without tracking you once you leave that page. This way, you get to keep your website-specific data–passwords, usernames, and preferences–without having your privacy encroached upon.

The real catch for trust tokens is that they don’t actually identify you the way that cookies do, and while some of the side effects of trust tokens may resemble cookie use–e.g., advertisers knowing you clicked on their ad–tokens are a decidedly less personal, more private way to access web content.

Funding Choices, Google’s consent management tool for publishers using Google ad servers, can now handle CCPA requests, Google announced Thursday. It’s integration with IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework is also moving forward.

Publishers can enable Funding Choices to collect opt-out requests from California residents and comply with CCPA. It is integrated with Ad Manager for desktop and mobile web visits.
“Funding Choices detects when a user from California visits a website, shows a CCPA message that allows the user to opt out of the sale of their personal information, and communicates the user’s choices with the publisher’s advertising partners,” wrote Vegard Johnsen, senior product manager for ads privacy and safety at Google in a blog post Thursday.