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Why Cookieless Advertising Should Still be in Your Strategy

Are we being punked? After years of warnings and preparation, Google has decided not to get rid of third-party cookies after all.

But that doesn’t mean we’re going back to digital marketing circa 2020 either.

Cookieless advertising and cookieless marketing are still significant opportunities for both advertisers and publishers. What do these opportunities look like? Technology continues to evolve and advance, but we have some answers for the here and now.

And 鶹Ƶ is prepared to help marketers drive even better results—with or without cookies.

What types of cookies are we talking about?

First things first—cookie deprecation was never about all cookies. It was only third-party cookies in the hot seat.

A cookie is a snippet of data from a website or technology vendor that is stored within a web browser and contains a user ID. These IDs are attached to individuals’ devices as they use the internet, which allows marketing/advertising platforms and content servers to serve personalized content and ads to each website visitor.

Cookies also serve as instrumental linkages in identity graphs that power people-based marketing strategies.

But there are two distinct types of cookies:

  • First-Party Cookie: The first-party cookie is created and stored by the site you are currently visiting. It allows the website owner to collect analytics data, remember language settings, and provide personalized settings that create a better user experience. 
  • Third-Party Cookie (3PC): The third-party cookie is created by sites other than the one you are currently visiting. For example, if you visit a website with an ad from another company, that ad can place a third-party cookie on your browser. This cookie tracks your activity across different websites, building a profile of your interests. These third-party cookies can be used for retargeting, frequency capping, and multi-touch attribution.

Due to privacy concerns, shifting consumer preferences, and increasing industry regulations, browsers were sunsetting third-party cookies (and some still are). But first-party cookies have consistently been alive and well throughout the ups and downs of cookie deprecation.

graphic showing the changing landscape with cookies and identity

What keeping third-party cookies means for marketers

Google’s latest announcement doesn’t mean much in the long term. You can continue using your existing strategies for tracking and targeting users—but the broader trend towards privacy-first digital marketing isn’t going away.

Browsers like Firefox and Safari have already disabled third-party cookies, and consumer choices on Chrome will gradually reduce cookie reliance. If Chrome’s opt-in experience is anything like Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) functionality, you can expect only a small fraction of users to opt in (as of mid-2024, the ATT opt-in rate had sunk to only about ).

Third-party cookies currently fuel the majority of programmatic and digital advertising—and the decreasing reliability of these cookies will impact most of the tactics you rely on for effective campaigns.

As users opt out of Chrome’s tracking, advertisers will struggle with:

  • Reach: About 80% of advertisers depend on third-party cookies. As more users opt out, those advertisers will need to search for other ways to reach their customers and prospects online.
  • Behavioral advertising: With less user data from third-party cookies, marketers will no longer be able to create the detailed profiles and audience segments they use for targeted campaigns.
  • Retargeting: Third-party cookies allow ads to follow users from site to site and retarget users based on the actions they take. Fewer cookies will reduce the effectiveness of retargeting campaigns and limit the ability to redirect traffic to a preferred site.
  • Frequency capping: Advertisers use third-party cookies to limit the number of times an ad is shown to a particular user. Without less reliable frequency capping, advertisers will waste more spend—and ROAS will decline.
  • Attribution and measurement: Losing a lot of third-party cookies means losing view-through attribution. This type of attribution allows you to track ad exposure across channels and evaluate the performance of your digital marketing mix. This will make it more challenging for marketing teams to unify fragmented customer journeys across channels.

Even with third-party cookies still in play, it will be increasingly valuable to collect data directly from customers, with consent. As cookies become less and less reliable, maintaining addressability will be essential.      

The future-proof approach to personalizing ads

Embracing a cookieless advertising approach will help you to maintain a high level of addressability—while also guarding against future cookie changes. After all, Google could change its mind again any time!

The industry is developing and evaluating several new ways to provide cross-site data collection and persistent identifiers. This will be a time of adjustment for marketers as we all learn to work within this dynamic environment.

But there are a few key places to start adjusting.

1. Strengthen your first-party data

You’ll hear this one everywhere—first-party data will continue to become more and more valuable. It will be critical to collect as much information about your own prospects and customers as possible, including:

  • Postal addresses
  • Email addresses
  • Phone numbers
  • Mobile ad IDs (MAIDs)
  • Onsite user behavior
  • In-app user behavior

It’s important, however, to make sure you’re collecting user consent (hello, cookie notice!) before implementing any first-party data strategy.

2. Resolve first-party data with an identity graph

Data on its own won’t do much to restore your ability to target ads, reach consumers, or measure your marketing. This is where a strong, interoperable identity graph comes in. An identity graph allows you to onboard your first-party data, resolve it to a real person, and reach those people in other places.

Perhaps the most beneficial aspect of a strong identity graph is identifying and reaching anonymous browsers (or unauthenticated web traffic). Sans reliable cookies, and without an ID graph, you’re marketing to these browsers with less data and less precision. The result is poorer marketing performance and less-detailed insights about your own active customers and prospects.

Capitalizing on authenticated site traffic is still the gold standard for targeting accuracy. However, as you might expect, this is typically a tiny portion of your overall traffic.

The best identity graphs allow you to identify and advertise to both authenticated and unauthenticated traffic—which solves the problem of cross-site tracking.

Graph of how cookieless advertising works with an identity graph

“This has historically been a cookie process—we cookie the browser and then we take that cookie ID, and we can go find you later because we can translate that to PII,” explains Jordan Seaton, Product Manager at 鶹Ƶ. “In the cookieless version, we take a cookieless ID and do the same thing. So, the value of the graph is high because we’re able to just substitute cookieless identifiers for cookies.”

3. Consider the server-side cookie

To solve the challenge of identifier persistency, martech and adtech platforms need to collect the most persistent browser-level identifiers possible. A native first-party cookie typically lasts for seven days. This is good enough for some attribution and may be sufficient for some use cases.

But the gold standard is the server-side cookie, which generally lasts a full year (365 days), even on iOS 17 (the strictest browser environment). Adopting server-side cookies, which are set and managed by the web server instead of the we domain, will greatly improve the quality of your customer profiles and give you the richest possible resolution on your users—across platforms.

Cookieless future solutions from 鶹Ƶ

Thankfully, some companies have been building cookieless marketing technology since the early days of deprecation—and 鶹Ƶ is one of those companies. As third-party cookies become less reliable, 鶹Ƶ is positioned to help you achieve your campaign goals.

Built to be identifier-agnostic

For the past 12 years, we have invested in building a leading identity resolution solution that was purpose-built to handle any identity space—with or without third-party cookies.

Our identity graph consists of 235M+ US-based profiles, consolidated from more than 1.9B email addresses. This makes our ID graph one of the largest non-third-party cookie-based, deterministic data sets in the industry. This deterministic foundation allows you to reach audiences at scale and personalize 1:1 messaging at the record level.

鶹Ƶ’s identity graph is also compatible with leading cookie alternatives, allowing for a seamless transition between identity types.

Powered by first-party cookies

To enhance addressability, 鶹Ƶ is transitioning to the new 鶹Ƶ Global Tag, built on a first-party foundation (including both server-side cookies and native first-party cookies). By shifting our tagging strategy to first-party cookies, we can increase signal quality and enable consistent user tracking.

Identify anonymous visitors

We’re integrating with the best cookieless networks to accurately identify unauthenticated users and maximize campaign performance. These new partners will be rolling out throughout 2024 and will undergo continuous testing and optimization.

Capitalize on authenticated traffic

Regardless of cookie availability, investing in your authenticated traffic pipeline still represents the best use of resources. By passing this data through our java script tags or files, we can leverage our extensive dataset to transition these users into multiple identity types, giving you the best chance to reach your highest value prospects.

Target, optimize and measure with intelligence

鶹Ƶ’s AI combines and interprets a wide range of proprietary signals on each person in our ID graph in near real-time. This allows you to build behavioral profiles to accurately predict actions, intent and brand propensity—without third-party cookies. 鶹Ƶ’s AI automatically optimizes campaigns for performance against KPIs, including frequency capping, look-alike modeling and retargeting.

Build your cookieless advertising capabilities today

Thankfully, the pressure’s off when it comes to cookie deprecation. But that doesn’t change the fact that marketers and advertisers should still be working toward a cookieless future.

Google’s recent announcement shows that nothing is certain, and staying ahead requires more than just reacting to changes—it means anticipating them and being prepared with the right tools and strategies.

At 鶹Ƶ, we’re committed to doing the work to create the most performant, full-featured solution in the market—regardless of identifiers. Our clients across industries are already delivering meaningful outcomes that don’t depend on third-party cookies (or Google’s fickle decisions).

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