What will cookieless advertising look like? | Fusion Alliance

Q: What will cookieless advertising look like?

A: Cookieless advertising will be:

• Broader due to reduced targeting accuracy

• More focused on gated content to gain first-party insight

• Geared towards transparent privacy and data use practices

Cookieless advertising may make campaigns more difficult to analyze in the short term, but companies that prepare can expect long-term growth.

Used to relying on third-party data to create ads that target aggregate groups of people with shared traits or behaviors, many marketers understandably wonder what cookieless advertising will look like once Google completes its deprecation plans in 2023.

Although the prospect may seem daunting now, the best way to prepare is to start shifting your strategy now, leaving more time to test and improve your approach leading up to the cookiepocalypse.

Expect challenges

Today’s customers are used to personalization. They expect you to remember their favorites, for items to stay in their cart over time, and not to have to remember their login details. However, they also expect their privacy to be respected, and that means the end of third-party cookies.

Without the benefit of aggregate third-party data to drive personalized content and retargeting, we expect to see some significant changes once the internet moves to cookieless advertising. For customers, this might include:

• Broader advertising campaigns
• Gated content and experiences
• Increased email marketing
• Transparent privacy and data use policies

From a marketing standpoint, we expect to see:

• Steeper ad costs
• Reduced targeting accuracy
• Limited use of customer lists
• More time spent on audience modeling

Design solutions

Change is hard. But cookieless advertising doesn’t have to be a disaster for your marketing department. Companies that prepare now will find significant opportunities in a first-party data strategy and may more easily pull ahead in early 2024.

Preparing for cookieless advertising begins with a deep dive into how your company uses third-party cookies today. What goals and metrics do those processes currently support? Which KPIs rely on third-party data? Once you understand your risk, you can start to plan solutions that fit your immediate needs and insulate your organization from future data privacy changes.

Plan to iterate

Once you’ve used your risk assessment to create a new customer data strategy that replaces third-party cookies with other data sources, you’ll also need time to test, measure, and iterate. Building your timeline to account for several months of improvements while your old strategy runs in parallel can help to mitigate your exposure when cookie deprecation reaches completion.

Wondering how to reframe your customer data strategy to prepare for cookieless advertising? Learn more about the impact of cookie deprecation, and how to prepare >>