No Cookies, No Problem: Online Marketing in a Post-Cookie Era!

Cookies have been the trending topic as Google has already deprecated it from 1% browsers and plan to do it 100% by end of 3rd quarter 2024.

Here is my understanding from what I have heard from Google/Meta and learned by reading different articles.

Since almost 20 years cookies have been a must-have element of every paid media marketing Platform/campaigns.

So let’s deep dive on this to understand:

1.??? what is Cookies (First party vs Third Party)

2.??? How Cookies are used today

3.??? How removal of cookies impacts your digital marketing campaign

4.??? How do we solve this

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1.??? First-party cookies vs Third-party cookies

A?cookie?is a text file with small pieces of data created by the webpage when the user is navigating. This information is used by the web to identify user, save user’s preferences & remember the session, etc.

There are different types of cookies, but today we’re going to talk about first-party vs third-party cookies.

First-party cookies are the ones directly created by the website the user is visiting, by the host domain. Within the wide range of uses of a cookie, they let us improve user experience with the information that they have of the user. Can be set by the publisher’s web server or any JavaScript loaded in the website.

Third-party cookies are those generated by a third-party server?and loaded in the website when the user is navigating. They are mostly used for tracking, retargeting and advertising purposes. (Eg. Facebook & Google generated cookies by their pixels)

Cookies have been widely used in advertising for nearly 20 years, but they become less reliable. Let’s see how they are used today.

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2.??? How are cookies used today?

Nowadays first-party cookies have a lot of uses, but mostly they are used for saving user preferences in the web and saving sessions. On the other hand, third-party cookies are used for building consumer profiles, tracking their habits, ad & website personalization & conversion tracking. Let’s see them deeply:

• Personalization: To display personalized ads to the user based on their previous visits and searches. This can also be called behavioral targeting.?

• Audience targeting: To impact those users who have already visited a website and matches certain criteria previously established. ?Third-party cookies allow your ad to reach a specific audience with a particular message.
• Tracking & Measurement: To track and measure the effectiveness of an ad. Cookies determine the impact of serving an ad to a user as it shows you who clicked on the ad or made a purchase.

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3. How will the removal of 3rd party cookies affect your digital marketing campaigns?

Cookie-based data is the most commonly used data for digital marketing strategies. The loss of third-party cookies means basically more difficulties to validate digital campaign effectiveness.

It will also be harder to find similar target groups to create lookalike audiences to gain new users, generate brand awareness and personalized ads.

Without the cookie with information from different domains, it would be difficult to know and limit the number of times a user sees your ads in a given time period.?

Now with this, view-through attribution strategies will be also affected and third-party cookies now will not be able to give marketer a full vision of the combination of the platforms ?& give analysis on where to spend more money according to the results.

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4. How do we solve this?

In this new third-cookie-less world we will have to build our own tracking server that connects directly with different tools (Facebook Manager, Google Analytics…). But how does the data get to the server?

From the client-side (CRM, Analytics) to the web server, and from there it goes back to your tools (Meta & Google).which means data is directly sent to the server from CRM/Analytics and from there it gets distributed back to platforms for tracking and optimizations.

For the above implementation Meta has introduced CAPI (Conversion API) and Google has enhance conversion & OCI (Offline conversion Import).

This new process restores transparency and efficiency in marketing procedures as it complies with GDPR, helps in unifying the user journey and combines events from multiple touchpoints.

For Offline Conversion import Guide Please follow below link:

https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2998031?hl=en

For CAPI Understanding & implementation please follow below link:

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/232481544843294?id=818859032317965