This year, third-party cookies (the tracking mechanism for traditional digital advertising) are going away. MarketingTechNews explains why and how this might affect you. Read the complete article.
Here are the highlights:
Why are third-party cookies going away?
Brands have long used third-party cookies to track website visitors, improve user experience, and collect data to target ads to the right audience.
According to MarketingTechNews, the main advantage of third-party cookies for advertisers was that they enabled the tracking of what users were browsing throughout the entire web within a specific browser, not just on the site on which these cookies had been installed.
While most third-party cookie usage is benign and designed to provide users with a more personalized experience, consumers are becomingly increasingly distrustful and are wanting more control over personal information.
Google announced in early March that “Users are demanding greater privacy—including transparency, choice, and control over how their data is used — and it’s clear the web ecosystem needs to evolve to meet these increasing demands” and Facebook has made similar assertions recently as well.
Why does it matter?
Brands that advertise online may not be able to target consumers as specifically as they could before. For the general public, more non-personalized ads will appear across the Internet, and advertising campaigns will become less effective.
Some direct-to-consumer brands have already started activating first-party user data from CRM, CDP platforms, and offline contacts in their advertising campaigns – others have taken a wait-and-see approach hoping a new technology will emerge.
Some viable alternatives to third-party cookies:
- Solutions without personal IDs
Solutions that will work without targeting specific user IDs.
- Universal ID solutions
Alternative ID solutions based on data that publishers obtain with users’ consent after they sign up for web resources.
- Alternative Solutions
Contextual targeting that shows ads to users who view sections on specific topics or visit specific web pages without binding user data.
While it may seem like the end of personalized ads, tech and media companies like IAB Tech Lab are already working on viable replacements for traditional third-party cookies.
Consumers dislike seeing ads that don’t apply to them (they love personalization) but don’t like the idea of sharing personally identifiable information.
To find a happy medium, it will take time, technology, and ingenuity.
