Author Jenni D'Alton
The words ‘cookieless advertising’ are enough for many in the digital marketing world to experience a feeling of hopeless abandonment. For years, marketers were afforded a huge amount of data such as user ID, user interests, or user habits, which they could leverage to support any of their strategic decisions. However, these glory days are soon to be over, because this data will be unavailable in the form of cookies on Google as of 2023. With Creative Automation, generating a vast amount of content is the key, and scaling content is the forward change for a cookieless future.
For over 20 years, cookies have offered businesses and advertisers a window into the world of consumers and their habits. Cookies, those miniscule pieces of data which track web visitors, are not in use in Firefox anymore and are set to become nonexistent on Google Chrome in 2023. Welcome to cookieless advertising.
It will be a loss of tragic proportions in marketing terms as the ability to map a potential customer’s buying journey on the web provides rich insight for further advertising efforts. When cookies arrived on the scene in 1994, they mirrored the necessary operation of real-life shopkeepers taking mental note of the type of visitors and potential customers they had. Before cookies, shoppers were anonymous online, so it is not to overstate when we acknowledge that cookies revolutionized online shopping.
Cookies, while not a nutritious food choice, are the digital nourishment startups and emerging companies rely on for building their audience profiles and devising their marketing strategies. Consumers too were seeing less irrelevant ads, as a result.
What are cookies and why should you care?
> Cookies are files with small pieces of data which save your browsing information such as your location, username, or what is in your shopping cart.
> Cookies improve online consumer experiences as marketers and advertisers can use this information to more smartly and relevantly target their audiences.
> With cookies being sentenced to death officially by the end of 2023, marketing teams need to devise new ways to identify the interests and behaviors of their audiences, in order to deliver content that resonates.
Why are cookies disappearing?
The reason that cookies are being forced into retirement is largely a privacy matter, according to a Director of Engineering at Google Chrome. Users are demanding more transparency and choice around how their data is mined and exploited. The ePrivacy directive, which has become known as the “cookie law”, also was put in place to monitor the assurance of confidentiality and consent in electronic communications. This introduced the constant pop-ups you see asking you to accept, decline, or modify cookies from this website.
General Data Protection Regulation has also significantly influenced this move to cookie obsoletion. Inquiries have even been opened into whether the mechanism Google employs for building customer profiles in digital advertising is compliant with European privacy rules.
But, a gray area will remain, just too gray of an area for marketers to bank on. Audiences are, as mentioned, requesting choice. Therefore, users can decide to “opt in” if they wish. However, audience sizes will reduce to an extent that the data is no longer scalable for any worthy media buying activity, likely amounting to low conversion rates.
Cookieless advertising: what are you losing out on?
In a cookieless world, targeted audience insights will be much less attainable. No longer will advertisers be able to easily tap into the proven interests and behaviors of those shoppers they want to know about. In a 2021 survey overseen by Boston Consulting Group, partnered with LinkedIn, concluded that 39% of marketers affirmed that data losses have already begun affecting their marketing performance and 56% expected this impact to grow.
Dynamic display ads are a current example of how these live and historical user signals can be utilized, signals such as product affinities, geo-location, or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) data, to reach the right person. Dynamic display ads, a format in the Google Display network which changes elements of an ad based on who is viewing it, may be affected significantly as a result of the certain death of cookies. They are naturally cost-effective as they draw the attention of the people most likely to purchase your product, services, or solutions. However, in a cookieless world, Google’s options for rotating ads based on individual data is more limited.
This loss will be felt acutely by marketers who do not identify alternative strategies for ad targeting. But there is no reason to market completely blind.
What are your alternatives for targeting audiences?
1. First-party data
2. Gated content and progressive profiling
3. Federated Learning of Cohorts
4. Increase testing by scaling production with Creative Automation
What alternatives have you got?
Even though audie
