2019: The year Google rethought the audience creation, frequency cap, and measurement

2019 was the year Google had to rethink the audience lists creation, the management of ad frequency and how it measures performance. New restrictions to third-party cookies (ITP and ETP) and new privacy laws (GDPR, and now CCPA) introduced new requirements for how Google collects and uses data.

Google says third-party data is under pressure and is relying more on first-party data from users connected with Google services. Meghan Biron, Global Media Technology Manager at Google, last month wrote that Google is using “machine learning to predict how likely it is that people will visit different websites that are serving the same ads,” and is also “modeling campaign performance with machine learning when conversion tracking is disrupted by cookie constraints.”

In October, last year, Google started to use machine learning to manage ad frequency in DV360.