Abstract
- A future without cookies. Preparing for a world without third-party cookies requires adopting holistic marketing measurement and understanding the complete customer journey.
- Data-driven solutions. Implementing customer data platforms and media mix modeling can help marketers move to a privacy-friendly, channel-agnostic approach.
- A privacy-first strategy. Embracing the retirement of third-party cookies means respecting user privacy and building a self-managed measurement framework that gives you a more complete picture of the effectiveness of your marketing.
Cookies facilitate marketing measurement. Wait, I'm at a loss for words.cookies make incomplete Marketing measurement made easy. This is the big picture story as marketers prepare for the onslaught of third-party cookie obsolescence. While this will create many tracking and measurement challenges in the short term, it will ultimately remove the crutch that marketers have been using to stay in a flawed measurement environment.
Marketers facing the transition to cookies need more comprehensive marketing measurement. And there are many lessons to be learned from this approach. Before we discuss these in detail, let's discuss the shortcomings of the cookie-based status quo. We hope this gives you a better mindset to start the (difficult) path to a cookie-free life.
Empty Calories (How Cookies Are Making Us Unhealthy)
Cookies have some great benefits. Its biggest advantage is that you can tie actions to ads, keywords, etc. at a very granular level and optimize accordingly. However, approaches that rely solely on cookies have significant flaws.
First, cookies have led too many marketers to fixate on last-click attribution, resulting in an overemphasis on direct response marketing at the expense of full-funnel viability, and an artificial shift in CPA. It will be kept high. Essentially, third-party cookies help marketers focus on individual trees without having to know much about the forest.
Second, third-party cookies don't translate between browsers, so simple customer journeys like seeing an ad in Chrome on your desktop and converting hours later in Safari on your iPhone aren't effectively tracked. When you add in the fact that cookies themselves are disabled, such as through incognito browsers or users not accepting tracking, what appears to be a very accurate measurement is actually very limited.
By building better long-term alternatives to cookie tracking, marketers have the opportunity to remove these limitations.
Related article: What would marketing be like without third-party cookies?
Deprecating third-party cookies: A great in-platform tool
Google and Meta (and their competitors) have been building tools over the years to help marketers address the problem of compromised tracking, at least since iOS 14. Google's Enhanced Conversions and Meta's Conversions API are both native tools that allow a marketer to connect ad interactions to his website activity using hashed (privacy-friendly) first-party data. I can. If these aren't enabled in your campaign, you should make them your top priority.
Another big set of tools is the lift test. This helps advertisers measure the down-funnel effectiveness of their “branding” campaigns. Available on Meta and Google. Of course, there's nothing stopping marketers from using these in conjunction with her cookies, but if you don't use cookies, it's essential to use them to understand the value of a particular campaign.
Related article: First-party data: Get creative with cross-channel identification
Why “CDP” is gaining attention as a new marketing acronym
Marketers have been talking about the value of their data for years, but that value is about to go through the roof. Understanding your users across channels is always important, but without her cookies you can rely on to understand the performance of your ads and keywords, understanding your users is the key to a successful marketing strategy.
CDPs (customer data platforms) like Segment, Tealium, and Customer.io collect first-party data from all sources and move the data center from the browser (which uses cookies) to servers that the company can control. It also removes platform bias and resolves issues such as overcounting conversions (for example, Google and Meta often take credit for the same conversions). While setup requires a lot of prep work and data cleanup work, companies with deep martech budgets should start researching CDPs now to manage their data.
MMM: The path to a higher performing marketing budget
Another acronym we've been using a lot with our clients lately is MMM (Media Mix Modeling). It is also channel agnostic and aims to show marketers where their money can be spent more effectively.
With enough historical data, MMM can direct brands toward a healthier media mix that spans the entire customer journey. This is the opposite of a stubborn reliance on last-click attribution. With MMM, you can quickly identify where you can save the most of your budget without impacting your bottom line and reallocate that budget to drive significant scale.
Similar to CDP, implementing an MMM platform (ChannelMix, Rockerbox, etc.) requires a lot of preparation, so plan to improve and maintain data hygiene and commit development resources to launching instances. Please make sure to stand it up.
Summary of deprecation of third-party cookies
My final suggestion to prepare is to accept the reality that third-party cookies are being deprecated. It's happening in the coming months and will dramatically change the way we measure marketing campaigns (on a practical and philosophical level).
In the aftermath, be ready to take on the challenge of building a world of privacy-friendly, self-managed measurements that give you a fuller, healthier picture.
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