Farewell to cookies means welcome back to contextual
In a statement today, Google announced its moving away from it's FLoC approach to addressing online privacy and launching "Topics".
It's a great idea. Letting users see ads that are relevant to their interests online, as opposed to their personal data is what Strossle has been advocating and delivering since day one. We're not gloating - we're super happy to hear Google is following suit (OK, perhaps a little gloating 😉).
What does this mean for advertisers?
Basic Contextual targeting - i.e. making an ad that should be relevant to the reader based on their media consumption, is about matching content with ad. It's the old-school idea of putting an ad for fishing gear in a fishing magazine. Online, this idea is hard to scale and advertisers don't want to deal with a myriad of niche sites to reach a sizable audience - therefore platforms like Strossle have created solutions where advertisers can select content verticals relevant to their audiences and let our algorithms do the work.
Next step on this evolution is to create multiple creatives that speak to a number of user interests. Fishermen are not thinking about fishing every time they go online, and online fishermen are not only interested in fishing. Making advertisements that speak to fishermen in different contexts make it possible to increase the size of an audience quickly. Creatives that appeal to the "Fishermen persona" can have contextual relevance on subjects like personal finance, environmental issues, marine farming, energy and travel - to name a few.
Making creatives that appeal to your audience in numerous contexts make it possible to be relevant and engaging across a vast number of sites. With a transparent and simple Cost-Per-Click model like Strossle's, you only pay for the traffic you want. We're not 100% sure Google will copy everything we do - but we welcome the initiative 😄
If you want to learn more, you can download our white paper on Contextual targeting here.
