How should marketers respond to third-party cookies being banned?
Apple has made a major update to the Safari browser in 2019, banning third-party cookies, which means that major advertisers or websites will not be able to track personal privacy on Safari.
In 2020, Google has hit with record $121 million privacy fine in France. Under tremendous pressure, Google also announced that to improve user privacy and security, third-party cookies will be completely disabled in the future.
Objectively speaking, banning third-party cookies can protect users’ privacy, but it will also cause harm to practitioners related to digital advertising. After all, it has been used to obtain information for ten more years. In the case of completely unable to use third-party cookies, it will have a huge impact on the entire advertising industry.
No smart ad recommendations
We can infer consumers’ preferences based on their web browsing behavior, and then push advertisements that may be of interest to them in the past. But now, if the use of third-party cookies is prohibited, we will not be able to accurately place ads and will waste a lot of resources on advertising with little effect.
At the same time, marketers also use cookies to determine the number of times a consumer has read an advertisement. Without frequency control, the consumer may have to stare at an ad that he would never order for many days or may continue to see an ad for a product he has already purchased.
Unable to track conversion rate
When a consumer views an advertisement, the advertisement will place a cookie in his browser to indicate that the consumer has seen it. If consumers subsequently enter the conversion stage (purchase, download, etc.), marketers need to be able to track each conversion rate they place on the consumer’s website, so that they can calculate the effect of the delivery, and then make an optimization strategy.
So when third-party cookies are banned, how should digital marketers respond?
Use email/phone number to identify customers
Digital marketers use third-party cookies to accurately identify users, so I think email and phone numbers are also effective ways. This method may even be more accurate than third-party cookies because some users have many devices. But this method also has certain disadvantages. If we pressure consumers to log in to access content and ask them to provide their email addresses and phone numbers, it may cause them to leave. To a certain extent, the “registration system” can help the platform obtain user registration data to keep tracking, but it may also cause to loss of part of the audience.
New ad targeting tool
The Washington Post has developed a first-party data advertising targeting tool called “Zeus” to provide marketers with detailed contextual targeting functions and user intent prediction. This tool does not rely on third-party cookies, so it is still effective despite more stringent data privacy regulations set. The Zeus platform monitors contextual data, such as what article a person is reading or watching, where they scroll to on the page, the URL they use to get there, and what they are clicking on. This data can then be matched with the existing audience data pool accumulated over the past years to create a hypothesis of the user’s consumption intentions. In addition to The Washington Post, Vox Media is also flexibly using its first-party data strategy to reduce reliance on third-party cookies and other intermediaries.
Since consumers now take their privacy and security very seriously, it is reasonable for Google to disable third-party cookies. So what we digital marketers can do is to seize the time to find new solutions, otherwise, we will face huge losses.
