Google publishes ‘encouraging’ results to cookie-free ad solution

In-brief

Google has published research on how its interest-based audience (IBA) solution performs when used in combination with privacy-preserving signals.

The online advertising behemoth found that Google Ads advertiser spending on IBA — as a proxy for scale reached — decreased by 2%-7% compared to third-party cookie-based results. For conversions per dollar the decrease was 1%-3%, and click-through rates remained within 90%.

The company called the results encouraging but said they “should not be considered as an unequivocal indicator of Google’s IBA performance after the third-party cookie deprecation.”

The privacy-preserving signals used includes contextual information, the Topics API from its Privacy Sandbox and first-party identifiers such as Publisher Provided IDs.