What To Do While Cookies Perform The Longest Death Scene Ever

With Google postponing yet again the end of support for third-party cookies in its market-leading Chrome browser, the tracking mechanism’s death spiral continues to stretch. But the abandonment by browsers—as well as regulation by new privacy laws—means the third-party cookie’s eventual demise is inevitable. The only question is what you should be doing while it fades away.

As you wait for the new landscape to fully emerge, the best strategy is to undertake a cookie risk audit and prepare your brand for life without third-party cookies.

A Kind Of Duct Tape

Cookies are like duct tape for marketers. They were initially designed for tracking who visited your website and what was done during the last visit, but third-party cookies were adapted for many new purposes and have become an unsustainable monster.

Perhaps this kind of online user targeting could have been better designed if the industry had foreseen what cookies would become, or had more fully accounted for the user privacy movement.

Now, better alternatives for OTT, CTV, and Email targeting may be emerging for the world after third-party cookies. There are privacy-compliant user tracking alternatives like UID 2.0 (Unified ID 2.0); consented targeting of logged-on users in the large walled gardens like Amazon or Facebook; identity graphs utilizing devices, IPs and hashed emails; and new forms of contextual targeting. And marketers are realizing that the booming sphere of connected TV (CTV) is basically a targetable but cookieless environment.

But the exact mix is not yet clear since there will not be a silver bullet to replace third-party cookies anytime soon, if at all. And the biggest uncertainty is the lack of a national digital privacy law to replace the current mishmash of privacy laws in some states. A national law could wipe out UID 2.0, for instance.

While a national privacy law is not happening immediately, it would be foolish to assume that the same forces creating state privacy laws won’t eventually coalesce across the country.

 

Cookies Crumble, Data Doesn’t

A cookie risk assessment can provide insight into where your marketing and data-driven campaign strategies are vulnerable to the changing status of cookies. Even first-party cookies are not a given. Many of the ways they are utilized may well be safe under a new national privacy law, but the reality is we don’t know for sure.

And if you haven’t already, this is a good time to test how well your brand can utilize proven targeting approaches that don’t require third-party cookies, such as identity-based targeting, contextual advertising and better utilization of your existing customers and visitors. As an example, if your website requires a login or registration portal, cookies are likely important for your business. If you use any retargeting strategies, whether online or social, that utilizes cookies too.

While undergoing such an assessment, it’s essential to go back to the basics and ask fundamental questions: How are you identifying target audiences and members within those target audiences in your media buying? How are you identifying website visitors and converters and linking back to CRM records? What tools are you using to combine those data sets to link the campaign impressions to the conversion data? Are you keeping track of your data hygiene as well as data enhancement?

Contextual ads, for example, are based on the content of the website the user is visiting rather than previous browsing behavior. Similarly, personalization on a website could be due to the fact that you’re logged in with an email rather than due to third-party data.

You may not currently be clear where cookies are being used by your brand to weigh the value of campaign tactics. This would be a good time to test out various cookieless approaches and focus on employing alternative persistent identifiers like devices, IP addresses and hashed emails via an integrated identity graph. Through the identity graph, these critical identifiers enable marketers to better target their campaigns to relevant audiences.

To understand the performance of different strategies for targeting, measurement and attribution, it’s always best to try out layered or redundant evaluation. In other words, if you add new tools and critical identifiers like hashed emails or IPs, try different ways of measuring their effectiveness. And hopefully, at least some data from your measurement tools will be familiar, and you can use that as a guide to evaluate the data from newer tools.

Navigating The Crumbs

In a way, we’re in a kind of luxurious period. All marketers are in the same boat, so it’s not like your audit and testing are putting you at a competitive disadvantage. In fact, the opposite is true. By better understanding your current cookie profile, and by testing the range of existing and emerging possibilities, you’re strengthening your flexibility for whatever lies ahead.

When you better understand your cookie exposure and which alternatives work best in your mix through an integrated identity graph with hashed emails and IPs, you can better guide your brand’s future. And with that knowledge, you can determine how and when your brand navigates around the remaining cookie crumbs—instead of leaving that decision to Google or the U.S. government.