These 2 changes include a page experience update with improvements for site owners and the death of 3rd party cookies. We’ve brought you this blog post today to help you stay in the know about important changes happening in technology, which can affect you and the advertising industry.
What do these Google changes mean for me and you? And what does the death of 3rd party cookies mean for the digital advertising industry?
1. Google Page Experience Update (rolling in slowly by August 2021)
Sites will not expect to see dramatic changes, but it’s important for site owners to know about the page experience update happening to both mobile and desktop search. Google’s goal here is to help improve browsing search experience. As you may know, Google studies your sites signals and offers a page experience score. This is accessible through the Search Console. A “good” page score will be determined by these categories:
- Core WEB vitals
- Mobile Visibility
- Security
- HTTPS usage
- Ad experience
If you’re a site owner and especially want to improve your user's experience on mobile, Google Page Experience is a resource you want to look into and use for your own benefit. User experience on the web, desktop and mobile are all important because this very experience will help YOUR customer or client make a decision to click and stay on your website or click the backspace and find someone else whose website works and flows better. With more and more mobile usage, it's time to inspect your own mobile experience. You can reach out to us to help. Scroll down and take our free assessment!
2. 3rd Party Cookies Going Away
While there are always alternative sites one can use besides Google, like DuckDuckGo, which is more privacy friendly, Google makes a big move towards respecting the privacy of an individual’s identity by soon killing off third-party cookies and not replacing it. Firefox and Safari have already done this, but expect Google’s 3rd party cookies to leave us by next year.
What is 3rd Party Cookies?
Snippets of code given to digital advertisers and websites to record our browsing history (in order to effectively advertise to us).
So what does killing off 3rd party cookies mean for you and me?
It means advertisers in Google will no longer track an individual’s user data; meaning, our personal identity is a bit more hidden from the advertisers. Essentially, Google will stop selling web ads targeted to individuals user's browsing habits (3rd party cookies) and use a new technology called FloC. They call it "interest-based" advertising that allows advertisers to target groups of people, or flocks, instead of an individual’s identity. Privacy concerns are in no way made perfect with this upcoming change, but it's a step in a positive direction for us, because our identity shouldn’t be the target. Now, this change doesn’t mean Google will stop using our data to target ads altogether (data is still tracked within Google products like YouTube and Maps), but again, it is a step toward “privacy-first” and “interest-based” advertising technology. Personally, I won’t miss the annoying little third-party popups that I usually experienced (and usually declined!)
Another thing you should know is as of the Apple iOS 14 update, you are able to stop cross-app tracking. And if you're a Google Chrome user, and you’d like to have some control over tracking, personalization and deleting data, we recommend you check out the Google settings right here.
What does this change mean for the advertising industry? Let's see what our own Google expert says about it.
Most likely the impact will be felt at the big brands that have personalized advertising to individuals. For small brands utilizing mostly Google Search Ads (not display or using elements like audience targeting), it will be mostly business as usual. In fact, a couple of years ago people were allowed to opt-out of advertising and many predicted a huge change in digital advertising; but there wasn’t! The latest release of iOS caused a problem with Facebook tracking, but again, we overcame in digital advertising.
It may be slightly different, but digital advertising can and will overcome these changes.
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