What does this mean for your campaigns?
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A
The way we plan and reach audiences will change.
The focus will shift away from cookie-based third-party data strategies as we move through this year and into the next. In fact, this shift began when GDPR came into effect.
The way we frequency cap will change as cookies can no longer be used to signal how many times a user has seen an ad.
Website audience-based remarketing will change, you will no longer be able to capture users using cookies as the tracking mechanism.
Attributing campaign performance will change, cookies are no longer able to be used to map a conversion point to an ad impression or click.
There will be massive infrastructure change behind the scenes, but on the campaign surface targeting ‘blocks’ (data targeting, contextual, re-targeting) will exist, but they’ll use different targeting data ‘currencies’ and varying scales.
Today the industry is moving in two different directions; what Google is doing and what the rest of the web is doing.
Cont.
However, the Privacy Sandbox and its various products have recently been deemed anti-competitive by the UK’s competition and market authority. This effectively blocks the removal of third-party cookies until regulators are convinced Google can provide a level playing field in the industry.
We expect Google’s technologies to evolve significantly over the next few months and will continue to provide updates in this guide.
Not at all. It still has billions of registered users on its platforms, such as Google Search, YouTube and so on, and it will continue to activate campaigns targeting those individuals.
This is still possible by using first-party cookies on these platforms.
Listen to our podcast, in which we discuss in detail how Google's news will impact your campaigns.
With Google announcing it won’t be creating a direct replacement for cookies, competition in this space has and will continue to flourish.
The rest of the web is moving in a totally different direction, assigning users an ID built in one of two ways:
The second option functions in a very similar way to how third-party cookies are generated today. It enables the preservation of 1:1 marketing without changing how brands reach and measure audiences digitally. Yet users still have full control over their privacy settings.
There are currently many ID providers in the market and this space will continue to grow as we move toward Google’s 2023 deadline.
Given the fragmentation of the ID space, being agile and working with all of the ID providers and ad tech platforms that align to your goals is vital during this shake-up phase.
It’s critical to be creative and find new ways of reaching target audiences. Brands will have to look internally at what first-party data they have about their current customers and how they can use it to reach these customers with relevant messaging.
They also need to explore new ways to capture potential customers. For instance, there is a real need to understand the value exchange that will need to take place in order for a user to share an email address and ultimately allow this to be used for targeting. Pointers can be taken from eCommerce sites that do this very well.
