Changes to third-party cookies may leave you wondering how you can still reach the right audiences and measure campaign effectiveness while respecting user privacy. Shared Storage offers a solution, providing a more private mechanism for storing and accessing data across sites.
Here's how it works:
- Information gathering: When a user visits your website, you can use Shared Storage to store relevant information about the user and their session. This might include data points like ad views, A/B test group, or user interactions on the site.
Ad tech companies can use Shared Storage to store both ads data and non-ads data, allowing for capabilities like cross-site aggregated measurement, and ad serving flexibility to rotate creates based on defined logic.
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- Data isolation: The Shared Storage API allows write access across different sites you own with privacy-preserving read access. For example, if you use Shared Storage to track ad interactions on your website, only your ad tech provider can access that specific data.
This ensures that other companies can’t view your data and preserves user privacy.
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- Data retrieval: When it’s time to analyze your campaign performance or understand user behavior, you can retrieve specific data points from Shared Storage for a variety of use cases.
For example, if you want to measure the reach of your campaign, you might call data related to the number of ad impressions.
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- Aggregation and output: At this stage, the process diverges based on the intended use case:
- Cross-site aggregated measurement: The retrieved data is sent to the Private Aggregation API, which aggregates (or combines) the data from other users who have visited the site. Then the API adds “noise” (or random data) to the final results, to further obscure individual user information.
- Cross-site content selection: The Select URL API allows the selection of a specific URL from a list based on the stored data. This API enables personalized content delivery within iframes or fenced frames. Refer to the developer documentation for a more technical understanding of how this API works.
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- Summary reports: For cross-site aggregated measurement, the system uses the now privacy-preserved aggregated data from Private Aggregation to generate summary reports. The reports provide valuable insights, such as campaign reach, frequency, and overall performance. With this noise-protected approach, the reports reveal trends and patterns without compromising user privacy.
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Shared Storage is a general purpose API intended to be used by a wide range of ecosystem partners. This technology can help empower advertisers and ad tech providers to deliver relevant ads and measure campaign effectiveness while protecting user privacy.
For a more technical understanding of how Shared Storage works, refer to the developer documentation.