A Cookie-Less World: How Do Marketers Survive After The Cookie Crumbles?

Google announced in January of 2020 its plans to “phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome… within two years.”

This means that, in two years, all major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, will no longer use third-party cookies to capture login details, language preferences, and other user information, which are useful in creating personalized content for different target audiences.

As the clock ticks on third-party cookies, brands need to plan for such changes and rethink their strategies, including their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, which will be greatly affected by this initiative, as early as now.

Google phasing out third-party cookies

The increasing demand for personalized user experience has pushed companies into aggressively collecting data. However, 91% of consumers around the world are becoming increasingly concerned about the amount of information companies collect about them. 42% of consumers have actually started to reduce the amount of data they share online. Because of this, a lot of technology platforms, particularly Google, have taken steps to implement or announce restrictions on data collection and user tracking.

How does all this affect organizations?

• It transforms data management conditions, which means that user content and positive value exchange are two of the key considerations organizations need to make. User data will available as advertiser-owned (first-party) and (tech or publisher-owned (second-party) cookie data, which is believed to be supplemented by clean, fully GDPR-compliant non-cookie-based third-party data.
• It changes how organizations engage with people online, limiting targeting and other widespread digital marketing tactics. Personalization will still be practiced but with other solutions, such as first-party data, contextual targeting, and location and time-based messaging, across main digital channels.
• It makes measuring performance, particularly conversion, much more complicated. However, investing in audience data technologies and marketing and advertising tools, such as CDPs (customer data platforms) and DMPs (data management platforms), will be worth it since there will be multiple sources of user data.

This is all part of Google Chrome’s Privacy Sandbox, an initiative that will create web technologies that both protect people’s privacy on the internet and allow companies and developers to use tools that will be accessible for everyone. With the impending doom of third-party cookies, the entire online ad industry has been scrambling to look for data collection alternatives.

Google Privacy Engineering Director Vinay Goel said that the search engine giant has set a new timeline for the cookie phaseout by late 2023. He said in a blog post, “While there’s considerable progress with this initiative, it’s become clear that more time is needed across the ecosystem to get this right.”

However, stage 1 of Privacy Sandbox will start to roll out in late 2022, giving advertisers, publishers, and adtech vendors time to migrate their services to work with cookieless technologies. Search engines and other online ad industry players have since experimented with new application programming interfaces (APIs), which will prevent tracking of individual users while also allowing advertising to target groups of people based on their interests and measure their campaigns’ effectiveness.

The Chrome team and other companies have made over 30 proposals for new privacy-focused ad technologies for targeting, fraud detection, and ad measurement. Out of all the proposals made, four are in the origin trial stage, allowing developers to experiment with the new features.

Surviving a cookieless world

Preparation is key to surviving in a digital world without third-party cookies. After all, changes are due to be implemented until the later part of 2022. This means that you still have time to prepare and make the necessary adjustments.

Here are some recommendations from the experts.

1. Improve first-party data collection strategy

To keep your business afloat at a time when the only user data acceptable to Google and other platforms are zero-, first-, and second-party data, the very first step you need to take is to ensure that you have a strong strategy in place to leverage this data. The key here is data collection – not just how you collect data but also what kind of data you collect. This is where you need to build trust with your target audience and develop a strong value exchange. By doing so, you will not only be able to leverage this data but also be able to identify, cluster, and analyze customer groups for your ongoing digital marketing campaigns.

The demise of third-party cookies will bring rise to second-party partnerships with retailers and publishers. Online enterprises can utilize services that share data between partners to create hybrid audiences between datasets, as well as develop enriched customer segments that can be useful to both parties.

2. Implement best-in-class cookie consent management solutions

Since Google made announcements about its Privacy Sandbox initiative, privacy and trust among your audience will have more value and importance. You need to pay attention. Moving forward, the online ad industry will prefer a first-part identity resolution approach to keep track of users across all touchpoints. Because the data you will be able to collect needs consumer permissions, you’ll need to build trust from your audience.

Once you have built more quality relationships with your customers, you’ll be able to effectively target people and recommend products that actually make a difference in their lives. This means that you’ll need closed-loop attribution to be able to determine who has seen your ads and whether they took your desired call to action or not. This should help you gain a better return for your ad spend.

3. Take advantage of data modeling and analysis

The clustering algorithm is one of the mathematical models that is used to analyze customer data further to provide publishers with more valuable insights into a brand’s customer base. It is also used to discover new customer personas or archetypes to target customer groups with personalized content to further improve user experience. One way to identify customer clusters is to base them on income and spending. You can then target each group with tailored marketing communications, such as reaching out to them via chatbots.

Another data model you can use is propensity modeling, which can help you identify customers who are more likely to take your desired call to action, like signing up for a promotion or purchasing a product.

4. Measure campaign performance and attribution

Clean rooms and data warehouse solutions, like Google Ads data hub, will be crucial for measuring campaign performance and sales contributions. With such solutions, you will be able to link your CRM first-party conversion data to your campaign performance data within the Google ecosystem. This will give you insights into how your audience engages with your ads across the Google ecosystem at an aggregate level.

Conclusion

In a post-cookie era, finding the right audience is going to be more complex for all organizations. This is why marketers should leverage first-party data and machine learning to gain better ROI on their ad spending. This is because the speed and accuracy of machine learning algorithms have been proven to be highly effective in providing hyper-personalized user experiences, increasing conversion and sales.

Now, more than ever, is the time to focus your attention, efforts, and resources on building people-based environments that don’t rely on cookies. The earlier you adapt to these changes, the better your chances of getting ahead of the curve.