For years, publishers and advertisers have been urged to test, test, test cookieless solutions.
Now that 1% of Chrome traffic is officially cookieless, publishers are finally testing the Privacy Sandbox. And the results are not pretty.
When publisher ad manager Mediavine did its Privacy Sandbox tests, latency skyrocketed and viewability plummeted, Yield from its ad impressions went down. Still, Amanda Martin, SVP of monetization and business strategy at Mediavine, is “pessimistically optimistic,” she told us.
During the testing, when PAAPI, or the protected audiences API, wins the auction, it takes an extra 1,500 milliseconds to load. Viewability averages 39% when most buyers demand at least 70% viewability. With this setup, CPMs inevitably go down.
On this week’s podcast, we bring on Martin, who previously held an SVP role on the buy side at the agency Goodway Group. She wrote a column for AdExchanger about her company’s experience testing the Privacy Sandbox and what the dismal early results mean for publishers, buyers, and everyone else in ad tech.
Mediavine is sharing its results with both the Privacy Sandbox team and the CMA, the regulatory agency that is fielding industry concerns and making the final call on whether Chrome’s cookie removal can proceed. Martin expects issues around latency to improve as the tests go on. They can’t get much worse.
