Taking a Bite Out of Google’s Third Party Cookies
In addition to testing Click-To-Call ads for AdWords, Google is quietly testing an addition to AdSense: 3rd party cookies for tracking image ads. Last week, some AdWords publishers received an email from the AdSense team advising them of the test.
Part of the letter reads:
“To track the performance of a campaign, 3rd parties ad-servers may place a cookie on users’ computers to capture standard web traffic information such as time, date, IP address and browser information.”
It’s something that has been lacking from Google’s roundup of AdSense services, and it will allow advertisers to run more individualized and targeted campaigns, opening the door to displaying ads on an individual site by keyword or subject. (Incidentally this may also result in increased AdSense checks for publishers.)
Google maintains that 3rd party tracking cookies won’t affect privacy, and collect anonymous data only, and that 3rd party tracking information will even be hidden from them. It also sounds like Google is only testing things on a small-scale with a handful of publishers. But with all the fanfare and press announcements that spring forth from Google whenever they start testing a new feature, you never can tell.
Jennifer Slegg of contextual advertising blog Jensense speculates that the addition of 3rd party tracking will encourage advertisers to increase their funding for contextual ads. It certainly it can’t hurt, and if the data is truly anonymous as Google says, there should be no “Google is spying on me” complaints. At least none that are credible.
First of all, if 3rd party tracking will make both sides of the advertising equation (advertisers + publishers) happy, why Google didn’t start testing something like this sooner? It probably had a little bit to do with technology. After all, Google is always working on a gazillion different projects at any given time. But it probably has to do mostly with the ever-changing landscape of contextual advertising.
For a long time, AdSense served only text-based ads. Anything more would’ve been “evil.” And then last year, when the time was right, Google added support for image ads (albeit very conservative images—no flashing monkeys & small file size). The internet had reached a point where images didn’t realty slow down internet connections, and publishers were used to Google text ads, so why not images?
I guess now Google is willing to test people’s sensibilities about 3rd party tracking cookies. It explains the low-key way they test new ad technologies. It’s like sticking your big toe into a lake to learn how cold the water is, rather than jumping in all at once.
There are some concerns, like how Google will enforce their privacy policy if they can’t access the information gathered by 3rd parties. Since there was no mention of it in the letter they sent out, I assume it’s something they haven’t quite hammered out yet. That’s the point of a beta test anyway. The product is out of the lab and ready for use, but it needs some field testing. When it’s lean and mean, we’ll probably hear more.
Reader Comments.
I’m not sure how you feel that only privacy nuts would care about the cookie isue….if google sets a cookie, then someone else can just as easily retreive it….tracking ip addresses content preferences and sessions on the scale of adsense sites? Someone is bound to get hosed…
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