Editorial
The Gist
- Cookieless future. Preparing for a world without third-party cookies requires embracing holistic marketing measurement and understanding the full customer journey.
- Data-driven solutions. Implementing customer data platforms and media mix modeling helps marketers transition to a privacy-friendly, channel-agnostic approach.
- Privacy-first strategy. Embracing the end of third-party cookies means building a self-controlled measurement framework that respects user privacy and provides a fuller view of marketing effectiveness.
Cookies make marketing measurement easier. Wait, I’m missing a word. Cookies make imperfect marketing measurement easier. That’s the big-picture story as marketers prepare for the onslaught of third-party cookie deprecation. It’ll create lots of tracking and measurement challenges in the short term, but ultimately it will remove a crutch that marketers have been using to stay in a flawed measurement landscape.
Marketers facing the cookies transition need a more holistic marketing measurement — and there are plenty of lessons learned along the way with this approach. Before I dig into those, I’ll talk about the shortcomings of the cookie-based status quo, which will hopefully put you in a better mindset to begin the (rocky) path to life without cookies.
Empty Calories (How Cookies Have Kept Us Unhealthy)
Cookies have some great benefits — the biggest of which is that we’re able to tie actions at a very granular level to things like ads and keywords and optimize accordingly. But there are serious flaws in an approach that relies solely on cookies.
For one, cookies let far too many marketers cling to last-click attribution, which lends far too much weight to direct-response marketing at the expense of full-funnel viability and keeps CPAs artificially high. Essentially, third-party cookies help marketers focus on individual trees without knowing much at all about the forest.
For another, third-party cookies don’t translate across browsers, so a simple customer journey like seeing an ad on Chrome on desktop and converting a few hours later on Safari on an iPhone won’t be effectively tracked. Add the fact that cookies themselves are disabled by incognito browsers, users not accepting tracking, etc., and what seems like a very precise picture of measurement is actually quite limited.
Building a good long-term alternative to cookie tracking gives marketers an opportunity to shed these limitations.
Related Article: What Does Marketing Look Like Without Third-Party Cookies?
Third-Party Cookie Deprecation: In-Platform Tools That Shine
Google and Meta (and their competitors) have been building tools for years — at least post-iOS 14 — to help marketers cope with compromised tracking issues. Google’s Enhanced Conversions and Meta’s Conversions API are both native tools that allow marketers to tie ad interactions to website activity using hashed (privacy-friendly) first-party data. If those aren’t active in your campaigns, that should be your first priority.
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The other big set of tools is lift tests, available in Meta and Google to help advertisers measure the down-funnel effects of “branding” campaigns. There’s nothing stopping marketers from using these in tandem with cookies, of course, but without cookies, using them to understand the value of specific campaigns is essential.
Related Article: First-Party Data: Getting Creative for Cross-Channel Identification
Why 'CDP' Is About to Become the Hot New Marketing Acronym
Marketers have spoken for years about the value of first-party data, but that value is about to go through the roof. Understanding the user, agnostic of channels, has always been important, but without cookies to lean on to understand ad and keyword performance, understanding the user will be THE key to developing successful marketing strategies.
CDPs (customer data platforms) like Segment, Tealium, Customer.io, etc. collect first-party data from all sources and move the data center from browsers (which use cookies) to servers, which companies can control. It also removes platform biases and solves issues like overcounting conversions (Google and Meta often like to take credit for the same conversions, for instance). They do require plenty of legwork and data-cleanliness work to set up, but companies with sufficient martech budgets should start digging into CDP research now with the intent of controlling their data.
MMM: Your Path to Higher-Performing Marketing Budgets
The other acronym we’re using a ton with clients these days is MMM, or media mix modeling, which is also channel-agnostic and meant to show marketers where their dollars will be spent more effectively.
Given enough historical data, MMM can point brands toward a healthier media mix that encompasses the full customer journey, which is pretty much the antithesis of stubborn reliance on last-click attribution. When you implement MMM, you can immediately identify places to save huge proportions of your budget without revenue impact, and reallocate that budget to drive significant scale.
Like CDPs, MMM platforms (ChannelMix, Rockerbox, etc.) take a lot of prep work to implement, so make sure you have a plan for improving and maintaining your data hygiene and putting dev resources to work on standing up your instance.
Wrapping up on Third-Party Cookie Deprecation
The last thing I’ll suggest by way of prep is embracing the reality of third-party cookie deprecation. It is happening, within a matter of months, and it will drastically change (at a practical and philosophical level) the way we measure our marketing campaigns.
Make sure you’re prepared for the fallout and ready to take on the challenge of building a privacy-friendly, self-controlled world of measurement that lets you understand a fuller, healthier picture.
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