Since it became known that third party cookies are going to disappear permanently, there has been a lot of noise in the online marketing world. By the way, it's not a complete surprise, but rather a logical consequence of increasing online privacy awareness. This has everything to do with changing AVG (GDPR) regulations, ad blockers and increasing media attention to, and thus awareness of, all traces we leave behind on websites, search engines and social media.
Disclaimer: This blog describes our vision for the disappearance of third party cookies. In addition, it includes advice on how we would deal with this change and the consequences.
What many people don't know is that changes in the cookie world have been going on for a long time. For example, Mozilla Firefox set up Enhanced Tracking Prevention (ETP) years ago and Safari introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP): two ways to block cookie applications. Later, Google followed up with the announcement that the browser is being rebuilt and will be fully focused on (protecting) privacy by 2023.
This is good news for end users who have trouble with cookies, but not so good news for online advertisers. To identify the consequences of the disappearance of third party cookies, we first go back to basics.
A cookie is a file (also known as a piece of code) that is stored by a website on your mobile device or computer. This file has several purposes, including speeding up the website's loading time, remembering account details and the ability to save a filled shopping cart.
In practice, we distinguish between two different cookies:
First party cookies are placed from the website you're viewing or domain you're visiting. The primary task of these types of cookies is, for example, to save language settings, to collect anonymous statistical data (Google Analytics) or to improve the overall website experience. First party cookies ensure that you do not have to log in again when you return to the website and can continue shopping with your already filled shopping basket. If you block these cookies, these types of standard activities are no longer possible.
Third-party cookies are cookies that are placed by a domain other than the website you are currently visiting. These cookies are also stored locally, but have a different purpose. Third party cookies provide advertising networks, analysis and attribution tools with user and behavioral data. Using this data, ad networks can build profiles to target visitors within various channels. In addition, analysis and attribution tools can provide insight into the online route taken by new and returning visitors.
The disappearance of third party cookies affects your online marketing in several areas:
A/B testing: As described above, the disappearance of third party cookies will also have consequences for A/B testing. Recognizing a customer as new or returning is becoming more difficult, which can lead to the customer ending up in the wrong segment and reducing the reliability of the data.
The disappearance of third party cookies also has a significant impact on advertising platforms. These platforms are seeing their entire business model collapse and are logically already busy coming up with solutions to mitigate the impact. We have listed the most important solutions for you;
Contextual targeting is advertising on websites that match the product and/or target group you want to reach as an advertiser. For example, promoting snow chains on a page about winter sports or winter tires. In its latest update, Criteo indicated that they want to focus more on contextual targeting. That is why they are busy developing new techniques that make it easier to analyze pages for content. To ensure that it works optimally, the advertising party must feed the algorithm with its own first party data in order to build a lookalike audience. You can then use these audiences for targeting.
More information can be found here.
Google recently provided an update on FLOC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). The idea of FLOC is to form groups of people with the same interest, who are then assigned a joint ID. This makes one-on-one targeting impossible and can only be targeted at group level. Surfing behavior and interests are stored entirely on the browser side, so that a publisher can read this data to show relevant content.
One solution that Facebook has implemented is the ability to upload conversions via the Conversion API. This provides insight into the campaign's contribution in terms of conversions. So conversions no longer only have to be measured via the Facebook Conversion Pixel.
To mitigate the impact of the disappearance of third party cookies, you can take a number of steps to optimize your data collection without third party cookies.
First of all, it is important to inventory what data you want to collect. The purpose of this is to get an idea of your marketing mix. What channels does it consist of? Which channels are paid and non-paid? What is the share of certain channels? And of course: which channels use third-party cookies? Once you have an overview of your marketing mix, you can decide where to optimize
In the optimization phase, we look at the components that we can optimize and add.
The disappearance of cookies mainly affects paid campaigns. The importance of other channels such as organic, e-mail and direct is increasing. It is therefore important to further optimize these channels, so that you do not miss out on opportunities here. For example, get started with SEO or new email campaigns.
This may be an open door, but make sure that the analytics and conversion tracking are properly configured to measure the correct data. Of course, it is also essential that the cookie notifications are up to date and comply with the latest requirements regarding the AVG legislation. This way, on the one hand, you inform visitors about the use of tracking and cookies on your website, but you also enable them to make their own choices.
Where Firefox and Safari have already received updates that block third-party cookies, Google will follow in the near future. The implications of the disappearance of third-party cookies and the modified lifespan of cookies can have a serious impact on measuring conversions, attribution and a/b testing. Fortunately, there are already ways to fully or partially reduce part of this impact:
There are various anti-tracking prevention tools on the market that take on this task at an affordable price. The great advantage of this type of solution is that it is easy to install and requires little effort from the user. The disadvantage of this is that you are at the mercy of the tool and its roadmap.
Sidenote: an anti-tracking prevention tool offers no guarantee for the future. With the arrival of Safari 15 (where the IP is hidden), another chapter has been added to the ITP book. In addition, despite the delay to 2023 (according to the latest reports), Google still has plans to block third-party cookies by default in the Chrome browser. As a result, collecting your own web statistics will play a much larger role, and an anti-tracking prevention tool can already contribute to that.
Currently, tracking takes place by placing cookies on the visitor's side. In practice, we also call this method client side tracking. As an alternative, many major platforms such as Google make it possible to forward tracking and visitor behavior directly to the platform. This is also known as server side tagging.
By using a server side solution, you can forward the visitors and event data, together with a unique platform identifier, directly to, for example, Google Analytics, Google Ads or Facebook. How this will be set up depends on the platform provider. It cannot be ruled out that different server-to-server links will have to be worked with. But it is also possible that a hybrid solution can be used in combination with Google Tag Manager. Part of the measurement (e.g. user interaction) will then be placed in Google Tag Manager and business-critical processes (e-commerce) via server side tagging will be measured.
The platform is still under development, but several out of the box tag templates are already available. There are also disadvantages to this method, it can quickly become pricey and does require the necessary knowledge from development or the marketer.
These disadvantages are not due to anti-tracking prevention tools, which also use server side tagging. Purchasing and using such a tool is therefore also a logical first step. This allows you to start collecting more and potentially better data today, until server side tagging is more mature and you could then switch to it.
Yellowgrape believes that you can only create synergy between your marketing channels if your strategy is driven by data. To take matters into your own hands, you can immediately start collecting your own customer data (zero and first party). To achieve this, a first party data strategy is essential.
To be able to set up a successful strategy, you need to identify the various data needs and objectives in advance. You can do this by means of a measurement plan, which provides insight into what data is desirable to collect, how you can do this and what sources are needed for this. An important part of a successful data collection strategy is that you know who is active on the website at all times. You can do this by advancing the time of identification, which usually takes place in the checkout. This means that we will need to activate customers to subscribe to the newsletter or log into the website.
Once a visitor has identified himself, you can collect data about his or her (web) activity, actions (viewing and clicking behavior) and identify interests. By combining this data with zero party data from, for example, your CRM, back office and reviews, you get to know your own customer and gain insight into their wishes and needs. You then collect this data in a data warehouse and/or CDP and can then be used in your marketing effort (activation).
The strength of a CDP lies in merging first party data into a 360-degree customer profile. With these customer profiles, the marketer has all the tools necessary to entice the customer to make a purchase and to achieve long-term loyalty to the brand. This can be done, for example, by;
Over the past two years, we have been working closely with Squeezely, a powerful platform for data collection and personalization. This enables us to fully take advantage of (marketing) opportunities for our customers.
Basically, a data warehouse looks a lot like a CDP. After all, you can also collect all first-party data here in order to achieve a complete customer view. Unlike a CDP, however, a data warehouse is not focused on personalization and recommendations, but on collecting, storing and processing data.
A data warehouse can be seen as a large excel sheet within an online cloud. Within this sheet, you bring together multiple sources in order to ultimately connect them. To do this, you use unique keys, such as a product id or a customer ID.
Based on this dataset, you can calculate new values such as the customer lifetime value (CLV) or the number of days until reorder. In addition, it allows you to prepare data for the following purposes:
To set up a data warehouse, we recommend a combination of Google Cloud Storage and Google Cloud BigQuery. These are two packages that work closely together in the Google universe and are easy to link to other applications. The costs of setting up and using a Cloud environment are relatively low.
Do you have questions about this blog, are you curious about the impact of the disappearance of third party cookies on your business, or would you like us to contribute to a first party data strategy? Please contact us, we will be happy to help you.
