Privacy Sandbox for Android – livestream

Privacy Sandbox for Android is the biggest privacy initiative Google has ever undertaken on what is literally the world’s most popular operating system. So it’s kind of a big deal.

I did a livestream with Gadi Eliashiv on LinkedIn where we went through the announcement and some of the developer documentation, hitting each of the four main technology components of Privacy Sandbox

  • Topics, for targeting the right ad to the right person
  • Fledge, for retargeting
  • Attribution Reporting, for privacy-safe marketing measurement
  • SDK Runtime, a firewalled section for adtech SDKs

We did spend most of our time, of course, on Attribution Reporting, because Gadi is the CEO of Singular (a client of mine) and they do marketing measurement, and specifically mobile attribution.

For attribution, Privacy Sandbox has some significant new functionality, including two different marketing results reports: one that is basically fairly granular and user-level, and another that is high-level aggregated data:

  1. Events-Level Report:  basically a user-level report
    1. Limited granularity on the conversion side and user side (sort of like SKAN)
    2. Virtually unlimited granularity on the upper funnel. So imagine you can get infinite breakdowns here, like campaign/creative/keyword/etc … super super useful
    3. 2 to 3 postbacks versus only 1 postback in SKAN
  2. Aggregatable reports
    1. Encrypt all the user-level data, ship it off the device, and then have a safe service that will aggregate it in a privacy-safe way
    2. The safe service will decrypt the data and aggregate by keys like campaign or creative
    3. Can get selected upper funnel breakdowns (GEO, campaign, etc) data with more detailed lower-funnel data (revenue, number of purchases, etc)
    4. Only someone like Google can build this

We also chat about user consent, the Google Referrer, and the future of measurement.

Check out my blog post on Singular’s site, or go straight to the livestream here