|
Insights from Our Privacy Sandbox Testing
Source: Index Exchange
July 2nd, 2024
Summary: Supply-side platform (SSP) Index Exchange is the latest ad tech company 🔒 to share test results showing that Google’s Privacy Sandbox isn't quite ready for prime time. Index tested the Protected Audience and Topics APIs with 100 publishers, thousands of domains, and 10 demand-side platforms (DSPs). It found that CPMs for impressions without a third-party cookie or Sandbox identifier were 36% lower than impressions with cookies; Sandbox impressions were 33% lower, only a 3% improvement which is not enough to prevent significant financial pain for publishers.
source: Marketecture
Latency is also 28% worse for Sandbox auctions. Index also raises other concerns, including Google's requirements that auctions running in trusted execution environments (AKA TEEs) must use Amazon Web Service or Google Cloud Platform, creating potentially higher costs for publishers while boosting revenue for Google and Amazon. Still, Index believes the Sandbox has potential compared to alternatives or no replacement at all.
Opinion: These Privacy Sandbox reports are starting to feel like full-blown content marketing ploys. If you can roast Privacy Sandbox and back it up with some data, people will pay attention! People love a Google roast, after all. Just make sure you hedge at the end of your report by saying you still believe Privacy Sandbox can be a viable solution “with some tweaks”.
Harvey Dent, AKA "Two-Face"
We get it, Privacy Sandbox is not ready. There are a bunch of use cases that it does not serve well or at all (Index actually does a nice job highlighting some of these). There’s a lot more work to be done. And it’s definitely not nearly as effective as third-party cookies. Probably never will be. But isn’t that kind of the point, if Google’s going to truly protect user privacy? Let them battle with Apple on the privacy front to maintain Chrome and Android market share, while ad tech can use all of its fancy, new ID solutions to fill in the gaps. (*shhhh* but maybe all the fancy, new ID solutions don't work as well as we say they do.)
At this point, it seems like the industry wants to be angry at Google regardless of what it does. See:
Let's not do the bothsidesism thing. It’s unproductive. It’s paralyzing progress. Pick a POV and advocate for it.
Here’s our POV: we need to get rid of third-party cookies sooner rather than later, embrace what Privacy Sandbox and new-age identity solutions provide to us, and move on to bigger and better things.
|
