What is Google Privacy Sandbox?
Google has decided not to eliminate third-party cookies on Chrome, but it has still launched the Privacy Sandbox APIs. Many marketers breathed a sigh of relief.
However, even without a forced deprecation, the ecosystem is inexorably moving towards a world with reduced traceability. Safari and Firefox have already eliminated third-party cookies, and consent rates in Europe, after the introduction of TCF 2.2, fluctuate between 30% and 50%. Furthermore, the Privacy Sandbox APIs (Topics, Attribution Reporting, and Protected Audience) redefine the rules even for those who continue to use Chrome.
What concretely changes for display measurement?
The Attribution Reporting API replaces user-level measurement with aggregated and delayed reports. For performance marketing teams, this means less granularity in identifying which creatives, placements, and segments are most effective. Consequently, view-through measurement, which is fundamental for display, becomes much more opaque.
For brands that invest significantly in programmatic display and video, the impact is substantial: the metrics on which optimization has been based for years (view-through conversion, cross-site frequency capping, audience segmentation) will progressively lose reliability.
How to prepare: three concrete actions
The first is to invest in first-party data: every direct interaction with the consumer (registration, purchase, newsletter subscription) becomes a fundamental measurement asset. The second concerns adopting a measurement framework independent of individual tracking; Marketing Mix Modeling, based on aggregated data, is structurally immune to these changes. The third is to validate digital results with incrementality tests based on geo-lift, which do not require the use of pixels or cookies.
The Core Analytics perspective
At Core Analytics, we have observed the erosion of tracking for years and developed our CoreMMM platform precisely on this premise: robust measurement does not depend on platform sharing choices. Econometric models analyze the client’s proprietary data—sales, media, distribution—and not adtech platform logs. This is why they are effective today and will continue to be so tomorrow.
Leave a comment