The Cookie-less Future
It's one of the key questions we get asked when talking 1st party data, personalisation and digital experience. "What do you think will happen in a cookieless world".... First things first, the cookies-less world only means no 3rd party cookies. Cookies will still exist and first-party cookies will remain a core function of websites.
So when we say cookies-less world we mean 3rd party cookies-less world.
WHAT ARE 3RD PARTY COOKIES?
Loaded onto your browser when you visit a site, they allow advertising and marketing technology platforms to create or view your tracking ID and see the various places you have visited.
They are the reason you browse a product and then see that product with a price in your next content article, Youtube video or Facebook feed or the reason you get a cart abandon email, even though you never signed in or shared your email data.
The focus of this post will be the impact of media buying but in future posts, we will dive into the impact and measures across web personalization and measures.
WHY ARE THEY IN THE LIMELIGHT
Privacy on the internet and right-to-be-forgotten laws (GDPR, CCPA, LGPD etc.) are all pushing for a consumer's ability to see what you know about them and be able to delete the data you have.
ITP (intelligent tracking prevention) 2.3 has just been released with Apple driving the privacy change, although rapidly expanding the current use case is tracking via third-party domains will be limited and has forced a game of cat and mouse between advertisers and Apple.
The loss of third-party cookies is estimated to lead to a 10% to 25% drop in revenue due to loss of targeting.
WHAT ARE PEOPLE DOING
AUDIENCE RESOLUTION FOR MEDIA BUYING
In Australia, we have 3 key programmatic identity resolution providers leading: ID5, ATS and Unified ID2
The basic premise is the publisher knows the customer's email (or other PII), and you share your customer email (or PII) with the ad buying platform (DSP) to buy against when the hashed ID hits their Real-time bidding engine.
Google and Meta have both implemented Conversion API
This process requires that post transaction you share hashed PII to them and they will reconcile whether they served an ad to someone logged into their system with that PII.
Fingerprint tracking
We will dive deeper into probabilistic audience resolution models in a future post, but using all the visible browser signals to match a device (regardless of cookies) will continue to be leveraged across platforms
Logged in platforms
Will become the norm for content consumption (trade your email for our content) as well as Youtube, Meta and all logged-in platforms will take market share
HOW DO I MEASURE SUCCESS
When you lose track-ability of your customer, different solutions come to a head.
Last click attribution - is back like it's 2009 (as the referrer for a website is generally always trackable)
Media Mix Modeling - came and went with Attribution models but will always be part of the measurement strategy for business
Retail media - Buying at the purchase point of a website where intent is highest.
Data validation partners - think Quantium... with the combination of bank and telecom data to validate ROI
SO WHAT DOES THIS MEAN
Ads are going to be less targeted or personalised
Media costs in logged-in platforms will rise
Businesses that are best at ingesting, manipulating and sharing customer data compliantly, will get the best ROI on media (think full stack CDP)
Siloed marketing teams will be hindered the most.
Want to prepare for the cookiesless future? Talk to us today.
