Amazon has begun blocking Google’s FLoC from some of its websites. The company has changed the source code behind Amazon.com, WholeFoods.com, and Woot.com to prevent the solution from collecting information from these domains. The company began making these changes early in the week.
FLoC is short for Federated Learning of Cohorts. It allows marketers to target their desired audiences and customers by grouping users into different clusters based on shared interests and characteristics. While the solution offers effective audience targeting with greater user privacy, FLoC is still not without criticism. The main complaint is that the solution exposes sensitive information, such as consumers’ political or religious views, and making them targetable on these bases.
One of the main reasons for the blocking is that Amazon wishes to protect its intellectual property. It’s essentially not in the company’s best interest to let outside sources like Google to take advantage of its highly valuable shopper data. This is especially true during a high-volume time like Prime Days.
Blocking is also a competitive advantage for Amazon. The company has its own plans for taking some of the ad dollars Google currently controls by selling digital ads outside Amazon properties. As Amazon’s demand-side platform (DSP) takes off, the company plans to launch an identifier for tracking and measuring ads sold through the DSP and by publishers through Amazon’s publisher services division.
This is an interesting bit of news, and the story is definitely worth following. The blocking could have implications to organic customer search words that customers use on Google to find products on Amazon. However, we don’t think it would affect advertising on Amazon as that is done within Amazon once a customer is already there. We’ll make sure to stay on top of this development and chime in with updates.
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