Preparing for the End of Third-Party Cookies (Performance Marketing Roundup February 2024)
This is the first blog article in a new monthly series that will highlight news and innovation impacting the performance marketing space.
While cookie-related privacy laws like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation have been in place for many years, Google’s move last month to start deprecating third-party cookies in Chrome signals the true end of the cookie era.
I am by no means a technical expert in this space, but I’ve rounded up a few articles that provide a good basis of information on what this deprecation means for marketers and how media strategies will need to evolve going forward.
The bottom line: in a cookieless future, gathering first-party data will be critically important. Marketing leaders should be investing now in CDPs (customer data platforms), CRM tools, personalization use cases, targeted messaging, and the development of rich customer personas.
Reference articles:
The Ultimate Guide to Advertising Without Third-Party Cookies (Nativo)
Meeting Customers in a Cookieless World (Deloitte)
Privacy Sandbox for the Web (Google)
Cookieless Attribution: What Is It and How Does It Work? (mntn)
Key takeaways:
Audience targeting: Without third-party cookies, advertisers won’t be able to target prospective customers based on their internet browsing behaviors. Targeting strategies will need to evolve to contextual targeting, which involves showing ads that are related to the content a user is consuming. For example, a consumer browsing a European travel blog might be served an ad from a European river cruise line.
Building lookalike audiences: Advertisers have relied on third-party cookies to build “lookalike audiences,” which is the creation of a larger audience pool that looks like/behaves like a first-party audience. For example, an e-commerce retailer builds a target audience profile based on the demographics and behaviors of their current (i.e. first-party) customers. Then, they build a larger lookalike targeting model that relies on third-party cookies to identify users who mirror the first-party audience profile. In the third-party cookieless future, first-party data becomes even more important. A robust customer persona informed by first-party data will enable brands to optimize their audience targeting strategies across digital advertising platforms.
Retargeting: We’ve probably all had the experience of an ad following us around the internet thanks to third-party cookies. A version of remarketing may still be possible in the future, but it will not be able to use cross-site tracking. In Google’s Privacy Sandbox (their initiative to phase out third-party cookies), they discuss their Protected Audience API to address remarketing. Time will tell how this solution plays out.
The importance of 1st party audiences: When discussing lookalike audiences and retargeting, we touched on why it’s more important than ever to improve first-party customer data collection. In order to collect more data from your customers, there needs to be a functional and/or experiential benefit to them, such as enhanced personalization or a loyalty/rewards program.
Measurement and attribution: Advertising attribution measurement, particularly multi-touch attribution, has relied heavily on third-party cookies. Going forward, user interactions and conversions from advertisements will need to be tracked without cookies. How? Cookieless attribution methods use privacy-conscious tracking alternatives like device fingerprinting, which creates a unique profile based on a user’s device.
Stay tuned to future performance marketing roundups for more information on the evolution of the cookie landscape.
