Our article, Death of Cookies Part 1: The Impact, outlines the challenges that advertisers will face once cookies are phased out. To overcome these challenges, advertisers will need to find new ways to deliver targeted advertising, measure ad performance, and personalise the user experience.
Here are some solutions that advertisers should begin applying now to prepare for a cookieless digital world:
First-party Data
First-party data is data that is collected directly from the user, such as their email address or other contact information. By collecting this information, advertisers can still deliver targeted ads to the user, even without the use of cookies. Advertisers can encourage users to sign up for a newsletter, register for an account on their website, or provide their contact information in exchange for exclusive offers or discounts. Further to this, advertisers will be able to reach users through multiple media outlets that use login data - this is done through customer matching, where you are able to match your First-party data to the publishers' audience login data anonymously. In order to have control over your data and preserve privacy, it might be worth exploring data clean rooms.
Contextual Targeting
Rather than targeting ads based on a user's browsing behaviour, context-based advertising delivers ads based on the content of the website that the user is currently visiting. For example, if a user is visiting a website about sports, an advertiser could deliver ads for sports equipment. This approach still allows for targeted advertising, but it does not rely on tracking the user's browsing behaviour across different websites. Studies have shown that contextual relevance of advertising leads to an increase in ad resonance. Furthermore, it helps to maintain user trust since they will see ads that are more relevant to their current interest without feeling "stalked".
Focused Social Media efforts
With the rise of walled gardens, advertisers should focus on building a strong social media presence. Social media platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, offer powerful targeting options that allow advertisers to reach specific audiences based on their demographics, interests, and behaviours. By building a strong social media presence, advertisers can reach potential customers where they are already spending time, and target them with more relevant and personalised ads. In addition to that, social media is a space for conversation and sharing, which can lead to a stronger customer relationship and earned media.
Content Marketing
Another important aspect to consider is the importance of building strong relationships with customers. Advertisers can engage with customers by providing valuable content, such as blog posts, videos, and infographics, that are relevant to their interests. A big part of marketing is storytelling, and there's no better way to do this than through content marketing. Advertisers should invest in researching and testing the kind of content that increases consumer engagement and trust. By building trust and engagement with customers, advertisers can gain valuable insights into their behaviour and preferences, which can help them to deliver more effective advertising.
Focus on improving your creatives
With less accurate targeting options available to us, we need our creative to do more heavy lifting. It is unfortunate that marketers have been so taken by technological advances in the digital space, that our ad quality has suffered. Now that digital media can't be as hyper-targeted, we need our creatives to be more engaging and effective in capturing user interest. In order to do this, we must perform more research to understand our customers better, and run frequent creative tests to ensure that we are constantly optimising our creative and message. Refreshing our creatives consistently helps us avoid creative fatigue in our audience where they get so tired of seeing the same ad that they turn blind to us. It's important to keep things fresh in the cluttered digital world.
Embrace the future with AI and ML
Advertisers should start adopting new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). These technologies can help advertisers to analyse data from various sources, such as website traffic, social media interactions, and customer purchase history, to deliver more effective advertising. They can also be used to predict customer behaviour, which can help advertisers to deliver personalised ads that are more likely to convert. AI and ML will also be used to measure ad performance through data modelling which helps use fill the gaps with probabilistic data. They are not 100% accurate, and the technology may be a black box, so it would be wise of us to use the data as an indication of performance as opposed to being the source of truth.
Alternative tracking solutions
Finally, advertisers can also use other technology solutions such as browser fingerprinting, device fingerprints, and server-side tracking. These technologies allow advertisers to track users without using cookies, but it may not be as accurate as using cookies and may also raise privacy concerns. However, these methods are still being developed and may not be as effective as cookies at this time.
The deprecation of cookies will have a significant impact on digital advertising, but by adopting the strategies mentioned above, advertisers can still reach potential customers and drive conversions, even without the use of cookies. I'm sure there are more solutions and there will be more solutions to help advertisers overcome the deprecation of cookies, but as marketers, we need to be cognizant that what matters most is delivering a great brand experience that will gain consumer trust and interest. So, let's embrace this new wave of marketing that will benefit all and let's be respectful of our customers in doing so.
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