Enable Recency for User List Exclusions

[msteger-google]

In Display & Video 360 exists a recency setting that gets activated when positively or negatively reaching first-party audience user lists.

This setting is particularly important in prospecting use cases, where advertisers aim to reach non-first-party audiences. Given that in prospecting campaigns advertisers want to maximize their marketing dollars and not reach already known users again, they want to deploy exclusion of first-party audiences tactics to suppress the already known users.

However, there are cut-offs for advertisers that determine from what point in time onwards already known users become “viable” users to reach again. These cut-offs times are controlled via the recency settings.

DV3 wants Chrome to continue supporting this use case via the Protected Audience API. The complexity here is that prospecting ads are matched in the contextual call, where we don't know the interest group. Thus, we expect a change to this.

[michaelkleber]

Hello @msteger-google, please add your name and affiliation to your GitHub profile.

It seems like you could use the existing Negative Interest Group capability for this use case.

Suppose an advertiser wants their contextually-targeted ads to exclude users who have been on their website in the past 3 hours. Then at the time the user is on the advertiser's site, they can create a Negative Interest Group with a 3hr lifetime, using the lifetimeMs property at Join time.

[msteger-google]

Thanks for your feedback, Michael.

While the proposed solution in theory could work, it isn't advertiser friendly / acceptable. Advertisers would need to create multiple user lists if they want to use different recency settings. And if they ever want to change the recency setting, they would have to create a new interest group and build up sufficient membership levels from scratch.

All of this is cumbersome, time consuming, and comes with a likely massive lost of valuable 1P data.

[michaelkleber]

First, I don't think you mean that this is cumbersome for advertisers, but rather for the ad techs that advertisers use. For example, the DV360 screenshot in your original message is the advertiser-facing UI, and it could stay just the same, right?

Second, do you have any information to share on how often advertisers want to do things you're saying would be come harder, e.g. changing the recency setting in the middle of a campaign?

For short-term exclusions like the ones in your screenshot, e.g. not showing someone an ad within the first 30min after they visit your site, the need to "build up sufficient membership levels from scratch" doesn't seem like much of a hardship — after all, you would be done 30 minutes after deploying it! I agree that if you had been using a 30-day exclusion and you wanted to change it to 45 days, then it would take longer. If this is common enough, it might be worth building both the 30- and 45-day lists in advance.