Hi everyone! My name is Vinay Goel
and I’m a Product Director working on the Privacy Sandbox.
Welcome to the fourth episode of the 5 Minutes or Less series for marketers.
In the last episode, we answered your questions about FLEDGE,
a Privacy Sandbox proposal for helping you re-engage
with past visitors to your site.
Today, we’ll cover your questions about the Attribution Reporting API
which can help measure when an ad engagement leads to a conversion
like a purchase on an advertiser's site.
Question 1. What is the Attribution Reporting API?
We know how important it is for you, as marketers,
to measure your advertising performance.
That’s also our goal with the Attribution Reporting API.
This Privacy Sandbox proposal aims to help you understand the impact of your ads,
without identifying individuals as they navigate across sites
to better protect their privacy.
Question 2. How can the Attribution Reporting API
help measure performance in a more private way?
The Privacy Sandbox technologies provide a way to support use cases
such as conversion measurement without requiring the use of third-party cookies
or other cross-site identifiers to track users across the web.
This is possible thanks to advancements in privacy-preserving techniques such as:
Putting people into groups, randomizing the data and adding noise
so that it doesn’t reveal users’ identities across sites, and limiting the amount
of information that ever leaves someone's device or browser.
For example, with the Attribution Reporting API, we can record and match
ad engagement and conversion events locally in the user’s browser,
so the data stays on their own device where it can remain private.
Question 3. How does the Attribution Reporting API work?
The Attribution Reporting API gives access to different types of insights
that an advertiser or an ad tech provider may access via: Event-level reports,
which help provide transaction-level information, such as when a specific ad click
or view likely resulted in a conversion. And summary reports which deliver richer,
more detailed conversion data, such as purchase values or ROI
over groups of people.
These report types can also be used simultaneously,
as they are complementary to each other. Now let’s see how they work.
When a user sees or engages with your ad,
their browser will register that ad’s source, your website.
So when that user later converts, your website will alert their browser
that a conversion event occurred.
The browser will then match that conversion event to the initial ad,
and give it credit for the conversion, and schedule a measurement report.
And when you’re interested in the overall performance of your campaign,
your ad tech provider can use the API to give you insights into key metrics,
like total conversions or conversion rate, at an aggregated level.
Question 4. Will the Attribution Reporting API
accurately report my campaign performance?
It’s important for the ecosystem that the new technologies we’re building
both protect user privacy and help you build thriving digital businesses.
So we’re committed to testing and evolving these proposals
based on the learnings we gain along the way.
And to help provide more complete measurement,
ad tech providers who integrate with the Privacy Sandbox can use data
from the Attribution Reporting API alongside other conversion data sources.
More so, the API is designed with protections in place to limit abuse.
The Attribution Reporting API can detect and restrict
large numbers of ad impressions that may be fraudulent
to help you get a more accurate picture of your results.
Question 5. What’s next?
Chrome has already enabled the origin trials for the Attribution Reporting API
globally, and we will provide regular updates as the testing progresses.
However as a marketer,
you likely don’t need to implement the Attribution Reporting API directly.
Instead, you can continue to rely on your ad tech providers
to understand the performance of your advertising, the same way as you do today.
Like all Privacy Sandbox proposals, the Attribution Reporting API
will continue to evolve based on feedback from the industry.
So we invite ad tech companies, publishers and advertisers
to get involved in these discussions within the public forums.
Thanks for joining us today to learn more about the Attribution Reporting API.
That’s all the time we have for now, but stay tuned for next episodes in this series
to learn more about the Privacy Sandbox. Goodbye!