The cookieless future is coming and the way in which the industry will adapt seems to be more clear now. In this post I want to present our perspective of cookieless future in digital marketing and give an insight into how all of us could approach this important change.
Impact of cookieless future on digital marketing
3rd party cookies were the base of digital advertising market for many years. They were used for various purposes including retargeting, conversion tracking, personalization. They were base for identifiers swapping for programmatic advertising. By 2022 every web browser will block third-party cookies. Advertisers will no longer have access to users data to refine their targeted advertisements. Lack of 3rd party cookies means not only some complications for adtech industry, it means a huge distortion for companies offering audiences on sale. Where GDPR didn’t clear the scene up, now Google comes with some help.
Eliminating 3rd party cookies undoubtedly restricts the ability of many adtech companies to make any revenue selling services based on 3P cookies, like audience segments, or behavioral targeting. You’ve got two options: either give up and return to 1990’s digital strategies delivering lot of generic ads to random audiences (forget re-targeting) or update your data strategy and technology stack to adapt yourself to the changed digital market.
Here you got five simple steps you should follow.
Build modern tracking infrastructure for your website
You can still use technologies on your site that rely on 3rd party cookies. These technologies will not be able to perform the same use cases you got adopted without third-party cookies or mobile identifiers (yes, there is another apocalypse approaching).
You should audit and investigate exactly how your current solutions will adopt next year. You should investigate if data could be tracked at all, gathered and analyzed. Switching / extending your tracking possibilities now helps you build a strong foundation for future changes.
Data you collect can be utilized for targeting, personalization, analytics, attribution. Even if your webanalytics system is based on 1st party cookies (although data collecting might be built on GDPR infringement), what is quite obvious nowadays, it does not mean you will be able to access any data for any other purposes. If you want to continue of delivering personalization, segmentation, customer experiences you should start with basics, with data collection.
One more thing worth to mention is that any internally built infrastructure could be a short term tactic only. The dynamics of the digital market is quite high, solutions developed in 2021 could be useless in 2023. The flexibility of tracking infrastructure is crucial. You should adopt to coming changes with no additional investments – it should be done by your global vendor.
More soon …