What is Google Topics? and how will this change how you advertise? Google Marketing Live 2022

Google Marketing Live 2022 has come and gone. One of the big mantras this year for Google was "Private, Personal, Relevant" a definite response to growing user privacy concerns and the inevitable phase-out of third-party cookies.

Many people have been concerned about how Google will choose to supplement third-party cookie tracking and it was great to have some light shed on their proposed solution.

For those unfamiliar, cookies are a way to collect data about visitors on websites. They can assist marketing teams in understanding user behaviours and ad performance, but many individuals may find them invasive.

Users can improve their privacy and security by eliminating cookies. Firefox, Safari, and Brave are just a few of the popular browsers that have implemented this. Google will also stop using third-party cookies from its browsers in order to protect user privacy.

It's a significant shift for marketers who have historically relied on cookies for their advertising efforts.

Introducing: Google Topics

Google Topics will be the new way to advertise on Google. This change will impact the way businesses advertise in a cookieless world. Google Topics allows businesses to target ads to users based on their interests.

Google Topics or Interest-Based Advertising (IBA)will help advertisers reach potential customers and fund websites that cannot otherwise easily monetize visits to their site purely via contextual advertising.

How does Google Topics work?

Your browser will play a significant role in determining what you see with Google Topics. As you browse the web and collect data on the types of websites you visit, your browser will learn about your habits and interests.

Google has a list of approximately 300 subjects that it uses to categorize the websites you view. When you visit a new website, Google will assign it to the most appropriate category or Topic.

You then, as the advertiser, select from any of these topics to target users who have displayed an affinity for them based on their browsing habits. To maintain relevance Topics are limited to three weeks, and outdated topics will be deleted after this time frame.

Many advertisers are concerned about the 300 topics outlined not being sufficient to allow for precise targeting as they believe that the fewer topics there are, the more competition there will be for less targeted advertisements, which is something everyone involved would want to avoid.

As mentioned earlier, Google will not be officially retiring Third-Party cookies or Universal Analytics until mid-next year. But as the proposed solution already has growing concerns about increased competition, we believe it is important to get ahead of it.

As your historical data will be lost as of mid-next year, we recommend upgrading to Google Analytics 4 now, so you will not be left in the dark.

Google Topics is not currently live but will be running its first tests in a couple of weeks so expect more information then.

Until then, if you are looking for an agency to assist you with setting up Google Analytics 4 we have already helped many of our clients do this. Reach out using the form below.