By: Julianne Bohl

There’s been a lot of chatter in recent weeks about Google Chrome’s new no-track option, an answer to rising consumer concern over online privacy. So what will the no-track option mean to me as a leisurely Internet user? What will it mean to me as a search advertiser? I’ll bet if I asked five different people how implementing no-track would affect their online experience I’d get five different answers.

We know that Google will not collect users’ browsing histories when the Opt-Out extension is selected, but users will continue to see ads. How is this so? Not all of Google’s ads are served based on user preference. When I started out in Search, my campaigns consisted of keyword-search paid ads and keyword contextually targeted display ads. That was pretty much the extent of it. But a lot has changed in five years!

Browser cookies – a small piece of information sent by a web server to store on a web browser – have allowed us to collect signals about users’ interests, enabling us to build more-robust profiles of who our customers are. This profile is no longer just defined by the search engine queries and the content of the sites visited. With this wealth of consumer insight, we can now serve an ad to a former customer, informing them when an upgrade for their previously bought product is released. Or we can serve an ad to a non-purchasing browser, offering a site or product coupon. Do consumers really dislike these ads? Personally, if I’m checking the weather, I’d rather see an ad for sales on flights to Florida (because I’ve been researching this, and yes, I want to know about this sale!) than an ad for gardening (this is irrelevant to me – a eucalyptus plant is about as far as I get in New York).

So if users start opting out, and search engines and ad networks are forced to move away from preference-based targeting and back to the basics of keyword targeting, will the problem be solved? Will end-consumers feel more secure searching online or will they be irritated by the less and less relevant ads they see? What about advertisers? Will online marketing become less insightful? Will advertisers pull back from spending online? Will content providers dependent on ad revenue be forced to stop producing this content?

It’s tough to say. But I think as an industry, we can agree that we face the tough challenge of rethinking how we approach this space.

The phenomenon of online marketing has always been its measurability. The compelling data and the insights an advertiser can glean from campaigns are truly above and beyond any other marketing channel, and to potentially lose this is such a shame. Wouldn’t InStyle’s print team love to find an efficient way to send me my issue with one set of ads (if only they knew I always skip the beauty section) and my sister her issue with a separate set of ads (she saves the beauty section)? Search advertising is at the risk of losing what it does best: Understand consumers and reach them in precise ways that are personally meaningful.

If we lose this as advertisers, current and future brand enthusiasts lose out too. It’s up to our industry to find a way to maintain this relevancy while also securing users’ privacy.

Julianne Bohl is the Director of Search Advertising for NetX.