Last week Google announced that its rolling out Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC as a part of its initiative to stop supporting third party cookies. It is released as a part of developer origin trial which requires jumping a couple of technical hoops to activate these features as may impact normal behavior.

So I took the risks and jumped through the hoops to enable FLoC to define an ID for user activity. Read on for the demo!!

What is Google FLoC?

Okay Its Showtime !!

As of writing this post, this website is configured to capture user activity and assign cohort ID to Chrome browsers which have this feature enabled. Lets uncover how FLoC API works for each step users take for the most common path on my blog

Step 1 : Browse to sagarmandal.com

Step 2 : Browse to post about Adobe Campaign

Step 3 : Browse to post about Adobe Campaign & Snowflake

So what ads will I see?

Let’s assume that you browse to another media website showing ads named – notfake.news right after visiting my blog.

At this time your browser is identified by a cohort ID based on your recent history. The value is made available to websites to get the most relevant ad based on the cohort ID via a new JavaScript API :

cohort = await document.interestCohort();
url = new URL("https://notfake.news/getCreative");
url.searchParams.append("cohort", cohort);
creative = await fetch(url);

Lets assume that our good friends at Adobe Campaign & Snowflake have setup ads for the above mentioned Cohort Ids. As your cohort ID is shared, the DSP would present the most relevant creatives.

Predictions for Web Advertising Future

1. Even more investments from brands : For the last 5 years there has been a lot of a negative press about brands reducing/removing web advertising investments primarily due to brand safety reasons. I have been in those meetings where all stakeholders were limited by the capabilities of 3rd party and ad ecosystem to ensure brand safety. I predict that would be changing in the next 5 years as interest based ads would place the right creative based on user interests/intent and not based on cookie history.

2. User Privacy & Increased Chrome Browser Adoption : As we saw above there are no user IDs collected based on the browsing history. Besides driving confidence for users to adopt Google Chrome, advertisers can sleep well with the fact that the capability to capture, retain & manage user identifier within Chrome would no long be available.

3.Better Ad Experience : We all have had those experiences where the ads presented are not relevant to our digital interactions or ads that don’t make sense at all since they are too generic. Intent based cohorts changes the web ads game where advertisers have to build particular ads to get users interested to continue their intent. The only challenge I see here is delivering for use cases like retention & suppression which are dependent on certain user activity .

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