Helping Publishers Thrive in Today’s Privacy Environment [2024]

This post was most recently updated on January 3rd, 2024

Privacy remains a top priority across all of Google and it’s especially important for the publishers’ ads team. Today, I’ll share some updates about how we’re thinking about evolving ads privacy and how we plan to help publishers of all sizes navigate this landscape.

It’s unlikely to surprise anyone that the digital ecosystem is evolving.

Growing concerns from users, driven by missteps across the ecosystem have reduced consumer trust. 81% of people say that in the past year they’ve become more concerned with how companies are using their data. These rising concerns and expectations for privacy are resulting in technology changes like restrictions on user identifiers as well as additional regulations around the world.

Last year, we saw Ads Privacy and Regulations continue its global expansion. In APAC, India and China introduced new data protection laws and in the Americas, multiple US states began drafting privacy legislation along with Canada introducing the Consumer Privacy Protection Act.

In regions where privacy regulations are already established, such as in Europe with GDPR and ePrivacy, we’ve seen regulations expand their scope. For example, in the UK, the Age Appropriate Design code introduced new standards for protecting the privacy of users under 18.

Those were just some examples to demonstrate the continued growth of regulatory regimes globally. While fragmented and varied by geography, the principles across regulatory developments consistently focus on:

• Transparency
• Control and Consent
• Enforcement of these regulations
• Restrictions on digital advertising

MonetizeMore is here to support publishers with the ever-changing regulatory landscape, and the impact that has on your business.

In 2021, Google launched the new and improved privacy and messaging tab which brought GDPR, CCPA, and iDFA messaging into a consolidated UI for ease of use and implementation. They also launched Limited Ads, which helps publishers monetize content without any cookies or identifiers and a new serving restriction dimension in reporting to help you analyze trends. Lastly, real-time bidding buyers get support on non-personalized ad requests in the coming months.

Related Read: https://www.monetizemore.com/google-floc-replace-topics-api/

Ads Privacy Hub

Introducing the Ads Privacy Hub. A brand new resource dedicated to providing businesses, all the help they can get to achieve online advertising growth. This is like a one stop shop for Privacy-Centered strategies. 

This site will help publishers…

1. Understand the latest privacy changes and the impact they have on ad performance. 
2. Learn how to build a first-party database for an effective privacy-preserving ad strategy. 
3. Uplevel business strategy with tactical examples of how Google’s privacy-first measurement solutions work together to help achieve goals.
4. Get answers to common questions that marketers like you have about Google Ads privacy solutions.

This resource page was created by Google considering these factors…

1. Consumer Expectations. Users always want to have full control of their data and want it to always stay secure, private and unexploited.
2. Regulations. Lawmakers around the world are putting comprehensive data privacy laws in place to give control to internet users and to protect user data.
3. Platform Changes. Browsers and mobile operating systems like iOS and Android are shifting away from tracking people across sites and apps by restricting third-party cookies and identifiers.

The site also comes with a Planning Tool that helps provide solutions for privacy-first ad strategy. Publishers just need to fill out a survey form regarding how their site is set up and then they will be provided with solutions tailored to their business needs.

The Ads Privacy Hub is currently available in 16 countries (United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Thailand, Brazil, Canada, Italy, Turkey, France, Spain, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Hong Kong.)

On the other hand, the Ads Privacy Planner is currently available in 4 countries (the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Thailand) and will be available more broadly in the second half of 2023.

The Digital Ads Ecosystem Transformation & Privacy Sandbox

Even with all these changes, we believe that less user-level tracking is beneficial for consumers and the industry at large. Privacy and performance are not at odds with each other and can co-exist. But there will need to be a fundamental shift in how we do things. We have an opportunity to build sustainably and to improve the entire ecosystem along the way.

Google’s approach is rooted in supporting an ad-funded web while raising the bar for user privacy. It all starts with having a user-first approach. Google wants to meet and then exceed the standards publishers have for data privacy by providing protection, choice, and control. It also means investing in privacy-preserving that will establish a foundation for long-term sustainability.

From a publisher product standpoint, Google’s investing in 1P data and supporting direct publisher relationships with third-party demand providers. Beyond that, they are leaning into techniques like aggregation, anonymization, and on-device processing in the Privacy Sandbox.

In 2019, Chrome announced plans to deprecate third-party cookies and they shared plans to build a privacy sandbox. The sandbox begins with a premise that it wants to preserve users by moving away from flexible signals that the browser passes by default. Instead, Chrome wants to create purpose-built signals that developers choose when to use and are designed to protect user privacy.

Today, third-party cookies enable critical pieces of digital advertising like interest-based ads, remarketing, fraud prevention, and measurement. The privacy sandbox includes new types of signals that enable these same functions in different ways. It’s not important for you to be deeply familiar with all of these proposals as they will evolve but a few examples of the APIs are illustrated on the screen here.

It’s important to keep in mind that the Chrome timelines you see contain many milestones aimed at developers, like ad tech providers. Google’s own ad products, like other ad tech companies, develop in a parallel path as you can see in the above chart. Google’s Ads teams will engage with public documentation and discussions on the proposals.

Check out privacysandbox.com/timeline for more insights into Chrome’s testing milestones.

As a publisher, you may be wondering “Ok, now what? What does this mean for me?

There will be little to no implementation work for you to adopt sandbox technologies for Google Ad Manager. At this stage, no action is required but it’s important that you are aware of the sandbox as it will form a critical part of Google’s own ads products as well as potentially other ad tech companies. Beta testing opportunities will also be available for publishers this year.

Source: Google’s Publisher Privacy Strategy Team

Wrap Up

Our approach to putting privacy first is rooted in ensuring that we are creating a healthy ecosystem that works for everyone and finds the right balance between respecting user privacy, monetizing content development, and driving better RPMs for publishers.

MonetizeMore is committed to helping publishers of all sizes navigate today’s privacy environment and what lies ahead. Click here to get started today.