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Internet advertising knows you better than anyone else – better than family, friends, or even your partner.

Do a Google search for cinnamon bun recipes, and you will begin receiving promotions for muffin tins. Download a map of all the hiking trails in your area, and you will see ads for hiking shoes and walking sticks.

Online advertising can do this with amazing accuracy because it’s always watching you. It’s watching you as you read this article. The internet exists for a lot of reasons, but a huge reason is to make money. You are the consumer it is trying to separate from your money.

Website development takes this into account as well. The website design is created to prompt you to action. Buy.

The invasion of privacy makes many people cringe. At the same time, many people like the suggestions for complementary products. The largest platform for advertising on the internet Google Ads, which is reportedly worth $134.8 billion in annual revenue. It’s Alphabet Inc’s primary source of revenue. This revenue is proof positive that online advertising works.

Last year, Google Ads announced that it would be ending its reliance on third-party cookies for delivering targeted advertising as part of a wider industry trend towards greater privacy protection for individuals. Now more details are available from Google Ads that it will not replace third-party cookies with comparable tracking technology.

Google Ads will continue with relevant advertising. However, it will do so without user tracking by anonymizing your identity within a crowd. The technical term is a Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC).

Google FloC and Website Design

When Google changes the way it tracks user data across the internet, the widespread use of the Chrome browser will have a key impact on privacy and security implications. Not everyone is happy with this.

The FLoC technology is a way that advertisers can still target ads without exposing data to individual users. It does this by grouping people with similar interests together: cooks, baseball fans, campers, etc.

“We started with the idea that groups of people with common interests could replace individual identifiers,” said Google’s Chetna Bindra. “This approach effectively hides individuals ‘in the crowd’ and uses on-device processing to keep a person’s web history private on the browser.”

Algorithms generate the cohorts or groups on a weekly basis. Advertisers see only the ID of the cohort. Any cohorts that are too small will get grouped together until they have at least several thousand users in them, to make it harder to identify individual users.

FLoC’s Impact on Advertising

Currently, if you buy a pair of hiking boots, you will typically be shown ads for camping gear and outdoor clothing. The complexity grows when trying to group even more specific information. Perhaps you read the Wall Street Journal, watch Big Bang Theory reruns, and buy size 13 shoes. The system requires billions of groupings that are too complex to express in spoken language. However, Google says it is making some progress.

This technology is so new and innovative, it’s difficult to determine its true impact on the internet, online advertising, and website design. FLoC is Chrome-based. Thus, some people are raising concerns about a monopoly.

There are also concerns about how FLoC builds the cohorts. Will Google still need individual tracking to generate the cohorts? This remains unclear. Still, if Google succeeds, other service providers will likely follow. It will have a wide-ranging impact on advertising, analytics, and marketing as a whole.

There is also a possibility that instead of FLoC, Google might facilitate one-to-one online relationships. If you visit a site, that site can send targeted advertising to you. This could mean an explosion of businesses that develop relationships through memberships and newsletters.

This is a huge potential change to the system that drives revenue from the internet. It will have a long-term impact on UX.

Give NOYO Web Development a call today for a free consultation. To stay ahead of the competition and keep your website design up-to-date and ready for change, be an early adopter rather than a lagger. We can help your business stay ahead of the curve.