Google’s cookie replacement—inside a publisher’s test of the new ID

Local publishing group Graham Media is trying to solve internet advertising without cookies, and recent tests with Google’s cookie alternatives show how the publishers could adopt new ad targeting tactics. But the tests also reveal the difficulties of the transition. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Graham Media Group runs local TV news stations and websites in hubs such as Detroit, Houston and Orlando, Florida. In many ways, it represents the exact type of online publisher most affected by cookie deprecation, as online privacy becomes a higher priority. After Apple ditched cookies in 2017, Graham Media saw an “overnight” drop of about 40% of revenue through Safari, said Michael Newman, director of transformation at Graham Media Group. On Safari, the usual way of filling ads programmatically lost its power. Graham Media has been testing some of Google’s cookie alternatives, experimenting with more contextual targeting—insights from what consumers read rather than data based on off-site internet activity—and more anonymous data. Apple helped start the anti-cookie movement by eliminating their usage on the Safari web browser on iPhones and other devices starting in 2017. The Firefox browser has also blocked third-party cookies, and Google is set to drop support for them in 2024. Without cookies, it’s hard for web publishers to maintain the value of their ad inventory. Also read: Google gives post-cookie ad tech update Newman said the transition to cookie alternatives is tricky, but Graham Media was committed to using new forms of IDs that don’t trace back to people’s personally identifiable information. There is a whole range of new ID services being developed by ad tech providers, but some of them simply re-establish the cookie, with all their privacy flaws, Newman said, which Graham Media wants to avoid. Publishers are testing a cocktail of less-invasive data signals to run the ad auctions, including passing along a “publisher provided ID” to advertisers, based on first-party data that the publishers have permission to collect. Graham Media has been testing Google’s publisher provided IDs, also known as PPID.More about Google: Alphabet's ad sales recover Graham Media ran a recent experiment using Google’s publisher provided ID function in Google Ad Manager, the automated ad platform for publishers. Graham collected first-party data through surveys to people who visited its websites. The responses to the surveys went into creating anonymous IDs that informed ads for people who returned to Graham Media websites. Graham Media said that PPID helped generate more clicks on the ads compared to ads that did not use the signal—with a 29% higher click-through rate compared to ads that had no audience data attached. In general, the costs per thousand impressions, CPMs, were up about 6% since implementing PPID, Newman said. Graham Media Group is a part of Graham Holdings Company, which also owns Slate, and other online and TV media sites, among interests in other sectors such as hospitality and automotive. Graham Media, like many local news outlets, has audiences in web, mobile and connected TV. On the web, about 5% to 10% of the audience is logged in, meaning the publisher does not always have a direct identity to attribute to visitors. The balancing act of targeting ads is further complicated when those logged-out viewers could bounce between one website and then open a channel on connected TV. Without a “durable” advertising ID it can be hard to serve effective ads. “Their long-term vision is to use the first-party data collected across their web channels to train lookalike models to build audience segments across their connected TV offerings,” Google said in its recent case study report about Graham Media Group. “Lookalike models” are ad audiences that resemble, in their online characteristics, a publisher’s known audience. For Graham Media, this is a step toward restoring what was lost in programmatic advertising when Safari and other browsers went cookieless, but it’s still hard to determine what it will look like on Chrome when Google blocks cookies. “One of the reasons why it’s been really difficult to test, is that [publisher provided ID] does work inside of environments that still have cookies,” Newman said. “So, we don’t really want to turn it off [cookies] too early just because the marketplace is not ready for that yet and we would see pretty significant declines.” Google also is developing encrypted signals, which allow publishers to work with data partners without leaking identities or characteristics about their audiences. PPID and encrypted signals are Google’s peace offering to publishers, according to ad tech companies that work within Google’s ecosystem. Google is ditching cookies and limiting data, just as Apple has done, but Google’s advertising business makes it more sensitive for the company to make these changes. Google has competitive considerations, and it could affect direct rivals when it implements data limits. Google also has been sued by the Department of Justice over its ad tech business. “Google has to allow for a way of doing things that works for the publisher,” said Mathieu Roche, CEO and co-founder of ID5, an identity and ad tech provider for publishers. “Google is catching up with the rest of us that understand that identity is important.” Google also has been testing Privacy Sandbox, its answer for how Chrome will share limited consumer data with publishers after cookies go away, through programs such as Topics API, which gathers an anonymized sampling of interests about an individual web user based on their past three weeks of activity. Tests show some success, but critics worry that Google can’t properly test all the ways that ditching cookies will hamstring the advertising industry. Tests in Privacy Sandbox have only applied to slivers of traffic, so they are limited. Also, in some tests, cookies are still available so results aren’t necessarily what they will look like in the post-cookie era. Last week, Google released new research about Privacy Sandbox, trying to show publishers that revenue will hold post-cookies. The results showed that the privacy-enhanced ads performed to about 90% of the effectiveness of cookie-powered ads. The prospect of reduced performance has created angst among online publishers and the ad tech community. Google’s tests also touched on the Topics API, which Google said was helpful to keep up ad performance, but it is not a panacea. “Topics API is not being designed as a standalone offering or ad tech in a box,” said Dan Taylor, Google’s VP of global ads, last week. Google has said that alternative IDs that rely on email addresses or other forms of direct personal data, even if they are anonymized through hashing systems, are not part of its long-term plans, either. Graham Media’s Newman agreed with that position, because he said he worried that IDs that use emails could give third parties a key to decipher consumers’ identity. Graham Media said it would experiment further with Google’s PPID, the encrypted signals program, data clean rooms and Privacy Sandbox. Graham Media also works within Local Media Consortium, a group of publishers developing an ID called NewsPassID, which claims to limit “third-party access to audience data.” Between PPID and NewsPassID “we were able to restore 60% to 70% of the demand that was lost by not having those identifiers,” Newman said. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs

Google’s cookie replacement—inside a publisher’s test of the new ID

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