Google this month announced that tests using FLoC provide a similar return on ad investment of cookie-based advertising.
This is possible using Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), a project from The Privacy Sandbox, Google's initiative to eliminate cookies in Chrome until the year 2022.
Last year, Google launched Trust Token API, part of Privacy Sandbox, to identify bots and real users, and also launched a Click Conversion Measurement API.
According to Google, FLoC-based cohorts will be available for public testing through origin trials with its next release in March. Google expects to begin testing FLoC-based cohorts with advertisers in Google Ads in Q2.
Google tested FLoC to reach in-market and affinity Google Audiences. Google says that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising.
FLoC hides individuals “in the crowd” and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser. Individuals are clustered into large groups of people with similar interests.