Topics API and Ad Manager

On this page

• What is Topics?
• How Ad Manager serves ads with Topics
• Publisher controls and reporting
• Progress tracker

What is Topics?

The Privacy Sandbox initiative aims to create technologies that both preserve people’s privacy online and give companies and developers the tools to build thriving digital businesses, which keeps the web and apps open and accessible to everyone. The Privacy Sandbox is an ongoing initiative that combines ideas from across the industry into new proposals that are tested, commented on, and iterated.

One of the Privacy Sandbox proposals that is being tested in Chrome is called Topics. As browsers phase out third-party cookies, advertisers need new ways of reaching customers with relevant ads, and Topics proposes a new, privacy-preserving way of doing just that.

With the Topics API, a user’s browser would infer topics (such as "Country Music," "Make-Up & Cosmetics," or "Vegetarian Cuisine") for a user based on their browsing activity during a period of time known as an epoch, currently proposed to be one week. The topic selected for each epoch would be randomly selected from the user's top five topics for that time period.

How Ad Manager serves ads with Topics

When available, Ad Manager/AdSense tags will retrieve Topics from the Topics API and pass those in bid requests. Publishers don’t need to do anything explicitly to be a part of Topics API testing. If desired, publishers can choose to opt out of Topics.

Publisher controls and reporting

We're still working on the Ad Manager product plans and we welcome publisher feedback on the types of controls that would be helpful. If desired, publishers can choose to opt out of Topics.

To enable or disable Ad Manager's ability to use Topics on your sites, including setting Topics, do the following:

1. Sign in to Google Ad Manager.
2. Click Admin, then Global settings, and then Network settings.
3. Under "Ad preference settings", enable or disable Chrome Topics data.

   When disabled, other ad tech providers may still interact with the Topics API. You can also opt-out of the Topics API altogether through Chrome's permission policy.

In addition, Ad Manager has also introduced a new “Topics status” reporting dimension in Ad Manager reporting which will indicate whether data from the Topics API was present on a given impression.

Topics statuses in reporting

There are three possible Topics statuses in reporting.

• Topics not available: When Ad Manager isn't able to receive Topics from the browser.
  This could be because:
  • The Topics API is not available from the browser.
  • The API is available, but Ad Manager wasn't able to receive a response due to unexpected errors or timeouts.
  • The API is available, but Ad Manager can't call it due to privacy constraints (for example, lacking personalization consent or the publisher opted out).
• Topics empty: Ad Manager received a response from the Topics API, but no Topics were available.
• Topics provided: Ad Manager received a response from the Topics API containing one or more Topics.

Progress tracker

View progress updates on our testing.