PAAPI-fy Your Privacy-First Marketing Strategy

Story by: Mateusz Rumiński

The deprecation of third-party cookies, though progressing slowly, began earlier this year when the trackers were removed for the first 1% of Chrome users. However, Google has since postponed the full deprecation deadline to 2025.

While some have welcomed the additional time more than others, it provides everyone with a greater opportunity to prepare and ensure their advertising remains effective in a cookieless world.

However, according to PrimeAudience research, almost a fifth of marketers are unsure where to start with their post-cookie preparations.

Keeping audiences protected

It may seem like the end of third-party cookies is still in the distant future, but the full deprecation date is going to come around a lot quicker than expected. Marketers who don’t familiarise themselves with the tools available risk being unable to connect with consumers and, ultimately, falling behind their competitors.

One such tool is the Protected Audience API (PAAPI), which should form a central part of any marketing strategy going forward.

Part of Google’s Privacy Sandbox, PAAPI places users into interest groups, meaning brands are still able to advertise to consumers, without the need to track individual people. Any information about a user’s inclusion in these groups is stored at a browser-level or on an isolated, trusted bidding server. Importantly, the data never leaves the user’s browser and, when visiting a site, an on-device auction occurs to determine which ad the consumer should be served instead.

What makes PAAPI an even more critical part of any future marketing strategy is its ability to be combined with other cookieless tools, meaning it can be utilised effectively as the key part of both retargeting and branding campaigns. Combined with other tools, such as contextual targeting or the Privacy Sandbox’s Topics API, interest groups can be created and activated with more precision, providing advertisers with the scale, reach, and personalisation capabilities they may believe they are losing out on.

Overcoming adoption obstacles

While a sophisticated cookieless strategy should include PAAPI, there are a few significant barriers standing in the way of marketers onboarding the tool. Most significantly, PrimeAudience’s research found that 30% of marketers don’t know how to use PAAPI, proving the need to not only educate people on its use cases but on its application in the first place.

Having long relied on third-party cookies, and the ease of which these enable marketers to operate, a bit of an uphill struggle is expected around any new solutions. PAAPI is complex and requires plenty of resources dedicated to the application and, as such, marketers should seek out partners that know how the tool works, how to implement it, and how to deliver the best possible results for the brand.

It’s also worth noting that, despite being a common misconception among marketers (34% believe it’s a costly tool), PAAPI is an entirely free tool to use, not including any costs associated with employing a partner to manage the technical aspects of the solution.

Time to prepare for the future

On the face of it, there’s still loads of time for marketers to prepare for the end of third-party cookies, but there’s no logical reason why this preparation should be delayed any further. Marketers who get their business in order well in advance of the deprecation date are going to put themselves in the driving seat to excel in the post-cookie world .

The delay has created a more level playing field for now. But marketers who haven’t already begun exploring solutions need to take advantage of the additional time they’ve been given. This will require them to test multiple technologies that are both functional and suitable for the future of digital advertising, which can be overwhelming.

However, there are technological partners in the market that are highly knowledgeable about the solutions that exist and can help marketers to figure out which solutions work best for them, overcoming the need to gain a complete understanding of the technical aspects behind these tools.

Whichever combination of tools proves to be right for the business, PAAPI will, more often than not, form the foundation of the most effective tech stacks. With the tool powering privacy-first marketing strategies, any brands that prepare effectively will minimise any collateral damage resulting from cookie depreciation.