• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, October 21, 2024

Advertisers are committed to consumer privacy despite Google pivoting on its third-party cookie efforts through Privacy Sandbox.

In July, the company said it would keep cookies but give consumers a choice they can adjust at any time.

Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) offers a glimpse into what might happen with Google's new elevated choice, according to Andrew Pascoe, vice president of data science engineering at NextRoll.

When ATT rolled out, some 70% of users opted out -- and continue to opt out -- of cross-app tracking, according to AppsFlyer data.

Pascoe believes that if Google's elevated choice sees high opt-out rates, it could have the same effect as cookie deprecation for many Chrome users. He thinks advertisers need to leverage multiple activation paths that include the use of alternative identifiers such as probabilistic and deterministic IDs.

That has not been enough for some advertisers that want more transparency. That need has forced marketers to find new ways to learn more about consumers. Some think the ability to analyze the performance of each ad helps to compensate for losing cookie data.

That's the approach Vancouver, British Columbia-based Zoomd took when developing its data platform used by companies such as Amazon Music and William Hill.

It allows marketers to understand the performance of each ad running across programmatic open web channels -- not on Meta or Google sites, but those connected to them.

Technology is integrated with all the platforms, exchanges, and networks Zoomd works with to show where each ad ran and whether it received a response or interaction from users.

Advertisers can gain, in theory, better optimization of activities while improving campaign performance and return on ad spend (ROI) on key performance indicators (KPIs).

Zoomd does not have access to ad-unit performance metrics within walled-garden platforms like Google and Meta, but can identify performance at the campaign level.

One benefit of marketing on the open web vs. within walled gardens is the ability to optimize results in real-time based on performance per ad.

In the Zoomd Data Platform, marketers will see how each ad creative is performing across all ad placements.

For example, if the marketer sees that the ad featuring kids in the swimming pool performs better on websites targeting women, they can shift the creative so that ad runs on the relevant sites. Diversity like a stock portfolio based on what performs best.

A consumer goods ecommerce marketer noticed that some publishers performed better at driving app events when targeting U.S. women, facilitating the optimization of campaign performance. This enabled the company to save money on future campaigns by focusing the spend on the best-performing publishers it managed to identify, resulting in improved conversions.

Zoomd also runs a variety of its other platforms such as AI search tools, online search engine, creative video service, and user acquisition and data analytics platforms.