How the Android Privacy Sandbox impacts your targeting strategy

One of the main concerns for mobile advertisers right now is how new privacy advancements will impact their ability to target and retarget users effectively. Among the most significant developments is the introduction of Google’s Android Privacy Sandbox. This new initiative aims to enhance user privacy while maintaining the targeting capabilities that advertisers rely on to speak to their customers.

In the first episode of App Privacy Unboxed, Remerge’s Luckey Harpley explains how the Android Privacy Sandbox APIs work and what they mean for your in-app targeting and retargeting strategies. Watch the video and check out more thoughts from Luckey directly below.

The good news for in-app retargeting is that not much will change when the Android Privacy Sandbox comes into effect. However, there are a few key changes and upgrades under the hood that you should be aware of.

First and foremost, the way you track users within your app and segment them into various audiences will largely remain the same. This means you can still create detailed user segments for your app marketing campaigns based on behavior, interests, or other criteria and use those to inform your targeting strategies. However, the process of finding and engaging those users once they leave your app—when they’re browsing publisher apps—is getting a revamp. Previously, you could rely on the Google ad ID to identify users across different apps, both within the advertiser’s app and on publisher apps.

To get around the Google ad ID for retargeting we have the Protected Audiences API (PAAPI). When users are in your app, they will now be associated with “custom audiences” that are stored directly on their devices. These custom audiences represent segments of users that you wish to target for retargeting. The magic happens when those same users later open a publisher’s app. At that point, the on-device custom audience becomes available for bidding, in order to show relevant retargeting ads to entice users back into your app.

While this privacy-centric approach might sound like a significant change, it’s worth noting that it’s mostly the tech stack behind the scenes that’s changing. While for you as an advertiser, it will be almost invisible, there is substantial heavy lifting on the side of the DSPs, SSPs and Ad networks.

This comparison, while common, is somewhat misguided. SKAN (StoreKit Ad Network) is a solution introduced by Apple to provide a privacy-safe way of measuring ad performance, but it doesn’t offer targeting capabilities.

Conversely, in addition to a comparable measurementAttribution and Reporting API, Google’s Android Privacy Sandbox introduces privacy-enabled targeting APIs such as Topics PAAPI, PAAPI and the Protected App Signals API (PAS). These are sophisticated tools that allow for accurate and privacy-safe targeting—something that simply doesn’t exist in SKAN. In other words, if SKAN is like the dashboard of your car that shows you how well it’s performing, the Android Privacy Sandbox is the entire car, giving you the full functionality to both drive and monitor performance.

From a practical standpoint, your discussions around targeting with your advertising partners will be as before. You’ll still be able to define your desired user segments, and your partners will continue to bid on those segments in order to bring users back into your app. The difference is that this process will now be done in a way that is more respectful of user privacy, thanks to the underlying changes in the Android Privacy Sandbox framework.

While targeting is staying relatively stable, measurement is undergoing some considerable changes, which I’ll cover in detail in a future post.

In summary, while the Android Privacy Sandbox introduces a new, privacy-first approach to mobile advertising, it ensures that the core functionalities of targeting and retargeting remain solid and effective. As advertisers, you can continue to focus on defining and reaching your audiences, remaining confident that these new privacy-preserving measures won’t hinder your ability to engage your users.