The elimination of so-called cookies, i.e. cookie files, is a very significant change in the advertising market. The move aims to guarantee internet users greater anonymity and privacy. Will it make the marketing we know a thing of the past?
Cookie files are responsible for tracking consumer behaviour and gathering information about them. The goal is to personalise advertising communication and tailor it to users in terms of interests, age or gender. It is internet users themselves who, when entering websites, decide what data they share with the script. In practice, this decision boils down to a quick click on a button and giving consent without delving into the details.
The current discussion concerns so-called third-party cookies, i.e. files used not by the website the user visits, but by its partners. Each of us has probably encountered a situation where, after buying sports shoes, we came across their ads long afterwards and across various sites, including our own inbox. This is down to retargeting and information coming from the aforementioned cookies. Thanks to them, ads are tailored to a given user and are also easy to measure in terms of their effectiveness - says Robert Stolarczyk, CEO of PromoTraffic, an agency running digital activities for e-commerce.
At this point, browsers such as Apple's Safari, with a share of over 18% (according to a Statcounter report, May 2021), Firefox (over 3%) and Edge no longer pass data from browsers to the websites visited. However, everyone is waiting for the move by the largest player - Google's Chrome browser (nearly 65% market share). The latter has declared it will resolve the matter by 2022. So there are still a few months left.
I expect, as probably many marketers do, that concern for user privacy is not Google's only goal. The biggest player will certainly not stop monitoring internet users, but it will do so in a more refined way and will not share the results with others. The new tool, Privacy Sandbox, which is being rolled out in Chrome in stages, is meant to ensure data anonymisation and individual protection, while at the same time providing commercial entities with a range of capabilities for effective online activity - explains Stolarczyk.
The second argument appearing in expert discussions is the growing share of activity in services via mobile apps. And these do not support cookies. In the longer term, user data would lose quality anyway.
What will change?
What will change?
Above all, the way marketers have so far gathered information about users. Far less data will reach analytical systems. And this in turn will make effective ad targeting using the tools used to date more difficult. This will be felt most by companies that have heavily segmented their databases based on collected analytical data and automated their advertising activities on that basis.
Marketers' challenges in the post-cookies era and the future of advertising
Retargeting based on lookalike audiences in Google or on Facebook should not change significantly, given that a user profile is linked to an account in each of these services. What is more, Facebook, used by nearly 22 million users in Poland, also has an advantage in the form of an app installed by most of them, and will still be able to profile users quite precisely on its own site. However, in the case of portals that do not link a user to an account on their service, the amount of information about the internet user will be much smaller. Until now, a visitor was given the same identifier on all sites using Google Analytics - after the change, the identifier will be unique to a given site. This will make monitoring and optimising ads more difficult.
The biggest changes will be in display advertising. Marketers will lose the ability to use some of the data belonging to third-party cookies - those that profile a user based on both search results and observation of behaviour on a site. Changes will also be noticeable in the automated ad space purchasing systems Programmatic and RTB, which in turn will lose the ability to target ads effectively. We are preparing for this carefully, especially since in the near future we intend, together with clients, to invest advertising budgets more heavily in display and video - combining brand-building activities with sales ones. Google Marketing Platform and the tools available within it will help us with this - explains Robert Stolarczyk.
Another change will be the reduction of the attribution model from 28 to 7 days. After that time, a visitor to a site will again be treated as a new user, with no history. As a result, the information collected about them will be of lower quality. Measuring advertising costs against their effectiveness over such a short time horizon will also be a challenge.
Challenges in targeted advertising
Challenges in targeted advertising
Activities related to eliminating cookies should above all satisfy internet users. In theory, they will give them greater freedom to decide whether they want to be tracked for better ad matching. Marketers will lose part of their analytical data, and this may result in a lower level of personalisation in the campaigns they run.
The truth, however, is that every industry has its own rules and each client must be approached individually, analysing the real impact of privacy policy changes on remarketing groups and on the effectiveness of advertising campaigns in terms of conversions - announces Robert Stolarczyk. - In my view, the changes should encourage websites and online stores to collect good-quality first-party data obtained in a lawful manner - respecting privacy and consents for further processing - adds Stolarczyk.
The role of marketing activities targeted at a specific user, via a unique User-ID, will grow, which means a kind of return to basics. This is a model that Facebook has been using for some time and that Google is introducing ever more efficiently. Contextual advertising, the subject matter of a website or the use of keywords will gain new importance. Nevertheless, activities will be carried out using modern technological solutions.
For marketers, a time is coming of intensive development of solutions, new promotional strategies and activities focused on building relationships with customers. The goal will be to strive to own one's own data - which is why a positive user experience with the brand and creating as many touchpoints as possible for them, as well as encouraging registration on a website or e-store, will become so important.
Changes in the area of marketing strategies are happening on an ongoing basis - dictated by changing laws or the emergence of new solutions. Regardless of those announced by the provider of the largest search engine, what will remain intact is what is marketers' greatest asset: measurement, observation, analysis and drawing conclusions.
