Cookies are the primary targeting tool for most advertisers, and most of the digital advertising ecosystem, about $330 billion, relies on them.
⠀
Google’s new Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) technology picks up relevant content and promotional offers based on custom cohorts formed by interests and is implemented as an extension of the Google Chrome browser.
The first tests of audience reach using FLoC technology showed that advertisers can expect at least 95% of conversions per dollar spent on advertising – compared to the effectiveness of a cookie-based advertising model.
To analyze user data, FLoC uses machine learning algorithms — groups of thousands of people are created based on the lists of sites that each participant visits. Personal data collected locally from the browser is never transmitted; only data from a common cohort of many people is transmitted, which is used to target advertising.
You can measure conversions by clicks using the event-level version of the API.
While Google was inventing a replacement for cookies, many publishers started using their own data or data uploaded to the site directly by the user.
⠀
But Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) technology is just the tip of the iceberg: Google is developing a so-called privacy sandbox, or Privacy Sandbox, while Google, unlike Apple, did not abruptly “drop off” the needle of cookies.
⠀
In the coming months, Google teams will continue to work out how best to use the proposed APIs to measure conversions in conjunction with Google’s analytics products, including counting conversions by impression, measuring reach gains, and attributing.