Google has announced it will postpone the deprecation of third-party tracking cookies in Chrome for another year. For performance-based marketers and their partners like Huddled Masses, this delay gives us more time to prepare for a future without cookies.
Many ask us what will replace cookies if and when Google blocks them from all Chrome browsers. Cookies, after all, are convenient in that they can be used for many purposes: targeting, measurement, and attribution. What will take their place?
The answer is that there will be no one solution. In the future we will rely on multiple tactics that are driven by a solid understanding of the individual brand’s ideal media mix.
Preparing for the Future Today
Huddled Masses, from a historical perspective, is performance-marketing based. That means not only are we focused on the impact to targeting audiences, we are also focused on the attribution and measurement impact of all marketing initiatives we execute on behalf of clients. Traditionally we’ve measured attribution on a channel-by-channel basis, but once cookies go away, this becomes more challenging..
Put another way, we have an opportunity over the next year to understand how specific digital channels -- display, mobile, in-app, social media, search, etc. -- perform in terms of achieving campaign goals and contributing to a conversion. Collecting and analyzing historical data on your channel performance now will help all marketers and their partners adapt attribution models if and when third-party cookies are finally deprecated.
Take, for instance, retargeting, a widely-used lower-funnel tactic. With third-party tracking cookies, we can track users who visit a website, down to the product detail page, and remind them of that product they viewed as they go about their digital lives. Without cookies, the reliability of retargeting will decline. How do we update this strategy in a cookie-free world? We will need to identify the context and content that’s relevant to the target audience across multiple platforms, as well as explore alternative targeting methods.
Additionally, we’ll need to prioritize activities that can be tracked and quantified, such as website traffic, social media engagements, lead generation, and sales conversions and other actions that can be measured and mapped in the customer journey. We may not be able to track who was exposed to an ad, but we’ll always have the ability to measure the number of consumers who click on an ad and visit a website.
The challenge is all marketers will need to take a bigger view of how collective marketing efforts interact to drive lower-funnel actions. This reality underscores the importance of mixed media modeling or MMM.
(MMM is a statistical technique used to analyze the impact of various marketing activities on a company's goals. It helps marketers understand how different marketing channels contribute to overall success.)
Marketers have dealt with media channels that don’t support one-to-one tracking (think: linear TV). We used test and control strategies to measure the impact of TV ads on consumers. For instance, we identify two very similar DMAs, one in which a TV commercial is aired and one where it isn’t. How do the buying behaviors of populations compare? If no difference is measured, we know that the campaign had little impact on consumers.
Improve the Value Prop
The other question we must ask is whether or not we’re having the right conversations with consumers. When consumers say they don’t want to engage with a brand, and don’t want to share their data with the company, is that a sign that the brand message didn’t convey a compelling message? Traditionally, marketers have relied on incentives to get consumers to interact. However, this approach doesn't necessarily build strong relationships.
I would also caution against relying solely on emerging technologies, such as ID resolution graphs, which protect users’ privacy but do not necessarily foster long-term customer engagement.
In a way, we can look at the whole privacy conversation as an opportunity to truly understand what consumers value, and to offer that value in every ad and brand interaction.
The ideal scenario is to encourage users to share their information voluntarily for a deeper conversation. This allows for more personalized interactions and more productive brand/consumer relationships.
