Google has offered an in-depth look at how automation will pick up where cookies leave off when targeting ads without browser cookies.

The company is collaborating with the advertising industry to transition to new private ad technologies that eliminate support for third-party cookies in Chrome during the second half of 2024.

Joey Trotz, director of product management for Privacy Sandbox at Google, in a blog post, describes how the post-cookie project will change its advertising platform once cookies are no longer used. Turns out the project relied highly on automation.

Adrienne Rice, M&C Saatchi Performance director of media investment Americas, has more faith in the new process, compared with what others have said about the project in the past.

“Advertisers still have a lot of tools at their disposal, including interest targeting, contextual targeting, retargeting and custom audience, and control over attribution settings,” Rice wrote in an email to Search & Performance Marketing Daily, encouraging others to join in the process. “Many components are still being developed and tweaked based on real-world testing.” 

New processes built on automation will rely on first-party data, contextual signals, and platform-provided privacy-preserving APIs such as the Topics API, FLEDGE API, and the Attribution Reporting API.

Machine learning, for example, uses patterns to optimize performance by adding more relevant audiences and adjusting bids based on the predicted performance of those audiences.

“The Privacy Sandbox is one of many sources of signals that will be available to inform machine learning after third-party cookie deprecation,” he wrote. “Machine learning can maximize ad performance by continually testing and learning all the best audiences, placements, and bids across time, campaigns, and even advertisers.”

Google’s goal is to reduce the need for advertisers to manage audiences, placements, and bids to simplify advertiser workload and enable machine-learning systems to drive the best outcomes. Ad-tech investments in automated solutions can also help transition away from third-party cookies, the company says.

Google believes that ad creative features that help predict performance, and that first-party data from publishers, brands and other sources that follow privacy-safe signals are sometimes undervalued, but can contribute significantly to advertising relevance in a future without third-party cookies.

Google is collaborating with the advertising industry to transition to new private ad technologies that eliminate support for third-party cookies in Chrome during the second half of 2024.