For the past couple of months, Google has been actively testing its Privacy Sandbox proposal for Cohort-Based Advertising – interest-based cohorts, and the preliminary results are in. The proposal, dubbed FLoC – aka, “federated learning of cohorts” – calls for using on-device machine learning to group people based on their common browsing behavior as an alternative to third-party cookies.
Imagine cohorts of coffee lovers, guitar players, young mothers or car intenders labeled with random alphanumeric strings. Advertisers could bid on impressions associated with a particular FLoC label on exchanges or in DSPs.
Google posted the outcome of its FLoC experiments to GitHub on Wednesday evening.
Early (bird) results
The findings indicate that interest-based cohorts could fly. Based on Google’s tests, FLoCs generate a nearly 350% improvement in recall and an almost 70% improvement in precision over a random assignment of users to cohorts.
Which is impressive, but doesn’t say anything about how interest-based cohorts compare to the third-party cookie-based targeting it’ll ostensibly replace.
Chetna Bindra, Google’s senior product manager for user trust, privacy and transparency, stressed that the testing process is only just starting and that Google is hoping to jumpstart more experimentation – and not just related to FLoCs – among the newly minted ad tech company members of the World Wide Web Consortium.
Google is “looking for the industry to engage in this a lot more,” Bindra said.
“We want to discuss these things at a much earlier stage, both in terms of development and testing, so that it can be done in an open forum,” she said. “This is a call to discussion as well as to action, and a starting point for communication.”
Ducks (not yet) in a row
But communication between Google and the vendor community within the W3C has been strained to date.
Although there’s been some breaking of the ice, ad tech companies as a whole are worried that the pace of development is too slow and that their concerns aren’t being taken seriously by the Chrome representatives in the W3C’s Improving Web Advertising Business Group.
And all the while, Chrome is nudging the ad industry away from one-to-one and toward targeting in the aggregate.
The Privacy Sandbox, Bindra said, “has been envisioned to ensure that we are moving away from one-to-one identity; the shift toward aggregation and cohorts will serve as “the foundation for privacy preserving APIs that allow for interest-based advertising while preventing cross-site tracking.”
Cohort-Based Advertising “is where the future is headed, at some level, in terms of targeting,” Bindra said.
Keep on flapping
It’s worth noting…
