Published on July 22, 2024
As the digital privacy landscape continues to shift, we're committed to helping publishers navigate these important changes. During the first quarter of 2024, we conducted an experiment to evaluate the performance of the Privacy Sandbox APIs and other first-party signals, such as publisher first-party data and identifiers, compared to third-party cookies. The results from this experiment are only directional estimates at the time the experiment was run, and therefore should not be taken as fully representative of the impact to publisher monetization where third-party cookies are not present.
The experiment had three arms:
- Control 1: Status quo baseline (with third-party cookies where available, with other signals as publisher first-party data and identifiers present as well).
- Control 2: No third-party cookies and no Privacy Sandbox APIs, with other signals such as publisher first-party data and identifiers present.
- Treatment: No third-party cookies, with other signals such as publisher first-party data and identifiers and Privacy Sandbox APIs enabled.
Key findings*
The results indicate that, in the absence of third-party cookies, using the Privacy Sandbox APIs and other privacy-centric solutions like first-party data can help publishers improve their monetization and mitigate impact from signal loss.
- Programmatic revenue impact without Privacy Sandbox: By comparing the control 2 arm to the control 1 arm, we observed that removing third-party cookies without enabling Privacy Sandbox led to -34% programmatic revenue for publishers on Google Ad Manager and -21% programmatic revenue for publishers on Google AdSense.
- Programmatic revenue impact with Privacy Sandbox: By comparing the treatment arm to control 1 arm, we observed that removing third-party cookies while enabling the Privacy Sandbox APIs led to -20% and -18% programmatic revenue for Google Ad Manager and Google AdSense publishers, respectively.
Comparing these findings, our tests showed that the Privacy Sandbox APIs created an incremental 13% uplift for publishers on Google Ad Manager and 3% uplift for publishers on Google AdSense. Note that the numbers do not add up to 100% due to rounding of individual figures.
*Please note: Results exclude programmatic guaranteed transactions as well as non-programmatic transactions (incl. guaranteed and non-guaranteed line items)
Looking ahead
While directional, these experiment results highlight the significant progress we have made since our 2019 study, where we saw that removing third-party cookies on a subset of traffic for the top 500 Ad Manager publishers led to an average 52% revenue drop.
We expect the performance to continue to improve over time as more publishers, advertisers, and ad tech partners continue to adopt and optimize their use of the Privacy Sandbox APIs and other privacy-centric solutions.
We’ll continue to iterate on our integration with the Privacy Sandbox in consultation with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority and share feedback on the APIs. We will also keep investing in building and optimizing our suite of privacy-preserving solutions to support our partners to drive durable ads monetization.