Topics API to Replace FLoC: Why Privacy-Centric Tracking is Bad News

You're listening to Digital Marketing Mondays. Each week we bring you new and exciting content from around the marketing industry and help give you, the marketer, insights into what's happening. We'll offer our advice and share some takeaways to help you develop better strategies for your marketing. Ideally, this will also help you improve your ROI as well. So with that, let's tune into this week's episode. Here we are, Hans. Another day, another marketing topic to discuss. What do we— yeah, what do we got today?

Yeah, so I was thinking, uh, we talked, uh, I don't know, maybe 6 or 8 weeks ago about the, um, this FLOC thing— Federated Learning of Cohorts, I believe it was. And this was sort of the Google's transition into the cookieless future, and it was still brand new and shiny, and we didn't know too much about it yet. Can you give us an update on what's been going on?

Yeah, the update is Google's canned it. So just last week they actually announced— at the time of this recording, it was a previous week, so, you know, around the last week of January— they decided that the federated learning of cohorts was not going to be a viable option for them, and so it is Gone. Now replaced with this new thing called Topics API.

Oh, we got a new thing. All right, cool, cool. What do we know about Topics API? Is that topics with an X or topics, T-O-P-I-C-S, like topics?

Like the latter. And it's an interesting one because it's basically a non-starter for advertisers. If you've been doing any form of Google Ads advertising, you know, in recent history, or even really looking at your Google Analytics data thoroughly, you know that there's something called affinity audiences, which is effectively grouping your website visitors or different people of interest that may have an interest in topics you're interested in, bucketed into a predefined list of potential topics that are of interest to them. And this Topics API is effectively the same thing, treated a little bit differently on the backend because it won't rely on the cookie to be able to do so, but rather the ad tech and particularly the reliance on add websites to store this information in your particular browser. So it won't be, again, not cookie-based, but it's effectively the same thing. I mean, there's only 340 topics or so that Google has kind of announced as part of this rollout. So it's going to be pretty, pretty not interesting for advertisers that have been doing any form of affinity audience targeting for any length of time.

Yeah. Didn't they have something in the market for, and there were certain number of topics there too, like real estate or automobiles and things like that. So they're kind of gross, large, broad, you know, shopping categories, if you will, but not the kind of specifics that advertisers really go for. Right. Is that, is there any relationship to that?

Right. Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. It's really just those broad swaths of topics, like There's a general topic category around politics. There's a general topic category around football and very high-level generalized buckets, right? They're not very specific. This is a sign that I think we're running into a lot of, you know, even Google is struggling with these privacy issues as it relates to, you know, not relying on the cookie to track people. I'm sure that they have some very smart engineers that could ultimately have a different way around this in a backdoor approach, but their public promise has been that they're not going to do that. And what's clear is, you know, as a result of that, they're struggling. This is really not going to be any different, you know, again, from— for the advertisers, not any different than the affinity audiences. So I'm pretty underwhelmed with this announcement overall, to be frank. And it's certainly one that I think had a lot of high expectations, and they've really dropped the ball here in terms of how it's getting executed. So yeah, really broad general topics. And I mean, you and I both know anybody that— anybody on the planet is going to be interested in football for, say, the Super Bowl, right? And that somebody goes to visit an NFL article, right? They go to NFLNetwork.com to go see what the game schedule is, right? It's a big game coming up soon. And it's— yeah, it's not going to be applicable because they may not actually really be interested in that topic, but because they happen to visit one time, now they're thrown into that bucket.

Right.

So the only good news coming out of it is they, they made it pretty clear at the outset that all of the data as it relates to, you know, pages that people are visiting or the topics that they've been put into, unless they're continuously looking at content within that same topic category, it will get removed from their browser and their history within 3 weeks. So there seems to be a little bit of a more regular turnover with this. In terms of how long somebody might be associated with a particular topic. But that said, I, I still hearken this back to the— there's still a problem lingering right now with this cookie-based tracking. And, and personally, I do not think that this is the best solution. So if you're a marketer listening out there, do not hang your hat on this. It's going to change between now and when they ultimately launch it. Still destined for 2023 at this point. But yeah, honestly, a pretty underwhelming announcement. All the way around from Google.

Yeah, well, FLoC didn't last long, as it turns out, so here we are again. And I'm assuming, um, just like cookies, you know, if you switch to a different browser or something like that, it completely breaks down, right?

So yeah, yeah, I think we've definitely— we'll continue to see a big war on privacy as it relates to, you know, the browsers that are being used, email tracking. Apple is really beating up on Facebook right now. In fact, I saw a funny meme the other day that showed a picture of a schoolyard kid on top of another one giving, you know, giving him the knuckle sandwich. And they had put a picture of Meta's logo over the kid's face on the ground, like clearly screaming and crying. And then Apple was the big bully with the knuckle sandwich. It was pretty— it was pretty funny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, it's not— it's not far-fetched. I actually saw something about a an investor meeting and the chief financial guy at Facebook was saying that Apple's move had probably cost Facebook something on the order of $10 billion in the past year. That's an interesting metaphor for how to depict that in a cartoon. But yeah, it makes sense. Makes sense.

Yeah. And it's, it's only going to get worse from here. So keep on the lookout, marketers, and continue to be looking for new strategies. And I guess I'll bring this home by saying that still your best way to be considering doing any form of retargeting or, you know, remarketing right now is still list-based. Get your systems in place to be tracking your own web visitors, collecting your own web data about who's visiting your website, how often, what pages.

Yep.

And start using those to build out lists and sync those lists over to ad platforms to be able to then target by. That we still firmly hang our hats, that that is a foundational element that really any marketer that's advertising right now should be using that approach.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I also, you know, doing everything you can to make each click or each visitor count. So, you know, conversion rate optimization, making sure your offers and everything is smooth and easy and attractive so that when you do get people to your website, you do make the most of them because getting targeted people to your website just seems like it's going to be getting harder for a while.

Yes, it absolutely will.

Okay. Well, thanks. Thanks for that news, Devin. It was a bit of a surprise, but always good to have the latest information here for our listeners. Thanks very much.

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