You visit Amazon and add a blender to your shopping cart
You visit the NYT, Amazon shows a blender ad to see if you want to come back and complete the purchase
Today this happens via third-party cookies, but with FLEDGE this would look like:
On the Amazon page, when you put the blender in your shopping cart Amazon would call the FLEDGE API joinAdInterestGroup to add you to some sort of amazon.com:prospective-blender-purchasers interest group.
On the NYT page, their ad network calls the FLEDGE API runAdAuction, and includes Amazon as a buyer. Amazon gets to run JavaScript in an isolated context which can look at amazon.com interest groups, see that you are in the prospective-blender-purchasers group and bid to show you a blender ad.
What you are calling “tags” would normally be called “user lists” or, in the language of FLEDGE, an “interest group”. (And “tags” are something entirely unrelated: snippets of JS people put on pages)
The incentive to provide true information in the simple version is that the advertiser is leaving a note for themself.
(There’s also a more complicated version, where an ad tech company makes some deals. For example, say ads.example contracts with a car website. On each page, the website includes some code from ads.example that adds users to ads.example:cars. Then, the ad tech company contracts with an advertiser, and agrees to target their ads to users who are in the ads.example:cars interest group.)
Ok, thanks, makes sense. So large companies like Amazon can set their own groups, and small companies will use Google-defined groups. (And competitors of Google can specify their own groups, which their customers will be able to use.)
The groups are a replacement for third-party cookies, because cookies allow to store arbitrary value, which makes it possible to assign an individual identifier to every user, while with groups the API is only “add this user to group X” and “check whether this user is in group X”. Also, small advertisers can only add you to groups when you visit their website; while their ad is displayed to you elsewhere, your data are read-only from their perspective.
Let me think for a moment… the first thought is that actually you can assign unique identifiers to users who visit your website. Using N groups, you can track 2^N users: user 1 is in the “id-1” group, user 2 is in the “id-2“ group, user 3 is in both “id-1” and “id-2” groups, etc. But this will not be so helpful, because when you are at the Amazon website, Amazon can track you using first-party cookies anyway.
And if you are on a different website… Amazon can create a rule “if the user is in groups id-8 and id-256 and id-2048, but not in groups id-1, id-2, etc., show banner saying ‘Jeff, I know it’s you’”, but Amazon will never be told if the rule was actually used. Or perhaps, they will (because they will be billed for displaying the banner), but they will not be told which website displayed the banner to you. So Amazon can only find out how active you are on websites with Google ads in general, but not which specific websites you follow.
They could find out your other groups, if they decide to spend their resources so, by making rules “if the user has id X (i.e. is in groups id-A, id-B, but not in groups id-C, id-D) and is in group ‘porn’, show banner ‘X-porn-yes’; if the user has id X and is not in group ‘porn’, show banner ‘X-porn-no’”, and then look at the invoice which of the banners was displayed. But they would need to set up rules individually for each user they want to explore.
The prototypical use case is something like:
You visit Amazon and add a blender to your shopping cart
You visit the NYT, Amazon shows a blender ad to see if you want to come back and complete the purchase
Today this happens via third-party cookies, but with FLEDGE this would look like:
On the Amazon page, when you put the blender in your shopping cart Amazon would call the FLEDGE API
joinAdInterestGroupto add you to some sort ofamazon.com:prospective-blender-purchasersinterest group.On the NYT page, their ad network calls the FLEDGE API
runAdAuction, and includes Amazon as a buyer. Amazon gets to run JavaScript in an isolated context which can look atamazon.cominterest groups, see that you are in theprospective-blender-purchasersgroup and bid to show you a blender ad.What you are calling “tags” would normally be called “user lists” or, in the language of FLEDGE, an “interest group”. (And “tags” are something entirely unrelated: snippets of JS people put on pages)
The incentive to provide true information in the simple version is that the advertiser is leaving a note for themself.
(There’s also a more complicated version, where an ad tech company makes some deals. For example, say
ads.examplecontracts with a car website. On each page, the website includes some code fromads.examplethat adds users toads.example:cars. Then, the ad tech company contracts with an advertiser, and agrees to target their ads to users who are in theads.example:carsinterest group.)Ok, thanks, makes sense. So large companies like Amazon can set their own groups, and small companies will use Google-defined groups. (And competitors of Google can specify their own groups, which their customers will be able to use.)
The groups are a replacement for third-party cookies, because cookies allow to store arbitrary value, which makes it possible to assign an individual identifier to every user, while with groups the API is only “add this user to group X” and “check whether this user is in group X”. Also, small advertisers can only add you to groups when you visit their website; while their ad is displayed to you elsewhere, your data are read-only from their perspective.
Let me think for a moment… the first thought is that actually you can assign unique identifiers to users who visit your website. Using N groups, you can track 2^N users: user 1 is in the “id-1” group, user 2 is in the “id-2“ group, user 3 is in both “id-1” and “id-2” groups, etc. But this will not be so helpful, because when you are at the Amazon website, Amazon can track you using first-party cookies anyway.
And if you are on a different website… Amazon can create a rule “if the user is in groups id-8 and id-256 and id-2048, but not in groups id-1, id-2, etc., show banner saying ‘Jeff, I know it’s you’”, but Amazon will never be told if the rule was actually used. Or perhaps, they will (because they will be billed for displaying the banner), but they will not be told which website displayed the banner to you. So Amazon can only find out how active you are on websites with Google ads in general, but not which specific websites you follow.
They could find out your other groups, if they decide to spend their resources so, by making rules “if the user has id X (i.e. is in groups id-A, id-B, but not in groups id-C, id-D) and is in group ‘porn’, show banner ‘X-porn-yes’; if the user has id X and is not in group ‘porn’, show banner ‘X-porn-no’”, and then look at the invoice which of the banners was displayed. But they would need to set up rules individually for each user they want to explore.
Except you can only target ads based on membership in a single group, not a collection. generateBid only receives one group at a time.