That’s The Way The Cookie Crumbles: How to Get Started with Cookieless Targeting
It’s been a year since Google first announced that third-party cookies would be sunsetted in Chrome from 2022. Google recently announced that once third-party cookies were phased out in Chrome, they would not be building alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse the web. They also would not be using these identifiers in their advertising products. To make matters even more confusing for marketers, Apple announced app publishers, DSPs, and mobile measurement partners would no longer have default access to IDFAs starting with the upcoming iOS 14.5 update. This would drastically reduce the efficacy of MAIDs as an identifier in marketing campaigns.
With so much in the news about the cookie crumbling and MAIDs going away, marketers may well be concerned about how they’ll be able to continue running effective marketing campaigns post-2022. But is there really anything to fear? We’ve got the answers to all your cookieless targeting questions below:
So cookies and IDFAs are going away, does that mean I can no longer run targeted campaigns?
The industry may have been left reeling after Google and Apple’s announcements in 2020 but we’ve all now had a year to work on different solutions and there is a myriad of proposals that could effectively take precedence once the cookie goes away.
It’s worth noting that third-party cookies and MAIDs aren’t the only identifiers marketers can use to target audiences. Here at LBDigital, we have IP addresses, hashed emails, CTV IDs, latitude/longitude, and anonymized individual IDs, not to mention the good old-fashioned name, postal, and email data. For household-level identifiers, marketers can precisely target gaming, digital audio, and Connected TV channels, which are growing in popularity and availability. Find out more about our CTV ID offering here >
Many companies including Google and Apple have voiced worries that individual targeting raises privacy concerns. Is it against privacy compliance to target individuals?
Just because a marketer is targeting an individual does not mean that individual does not want to receive personalized advertising. It’s too simplistic to classify all individual targeting as non-compliant and cohort advertising as compliant.
Privacy compliance is something all good data providers have been focused on for some time. At LBDigital, for example, we adhere to local privacy regulations including CCPA, GDPR & PIPEDA and all of our data is opted-in to receive third-party offers and all opt-out requests are honored.
LBDigital is a member of the IAB [Interactive Advertising Bureau] and TAG [Trustworthy Accountability Group]. Both of these organizations are watchdog groups for the digital marketing community.
Google says identifiers to track individuals will not be used in their products. Is that the case for all digital platforms?
No, other digital platforms such as The Trade Desk & Xandr are not following Google’s example, so targeting on an individual level will still be possible on other platforms. Instead, companies like The Trade Desk are relying on getting consent from a user to use their data. In the past, this has only worked up to a certain point as consent, once given, couldn’t be extended across the web to other sites. However, with a “Universal ID”, the same anonymized individual ID for a user will be shared across different sites. If a user logs into one website using their email, this will be matched with logins from other sites on which the user has given consent. In this way, a user can be tracked across all of the sites within that given ecosystem.
We will be continuing to provide individual data such as hashed emails that our clients can use to target their audience in the future. In fact, we are working with partners to provide anonymized ids such as LiveRamp’s Identity Link and The Trade Desk’s Unified ID 2.0 to maintain privacy-compliant data on individuals in a cookieless and even MAID-less world.
What about household targeting?
Marketers should consider targeting at the household level rather than the individual level in a cookieless world. To do this, here at LBDigital we can match postal addresses to exact IP addresses for one-to-one targeted digital display, mobile, video, and Connected TV ads.
To ensure you’re targeting the right household, we also have demographic data available such as age, gender, and household income as well as interest data, and transactional data with which you can drill down to your ideal target audience. Learn more about our quality demographic data >
What role will first-party data play in the cookieless world?
We believe that first-party data will become increasingly important in a cookieless world and we have a few different marketing solutions available which can help marketers to make the most of their first-party data:
Data Onboarding: We can help you to onboard your first-party CRM data to enable you to advertise to your own customers, donors, supporters, or prospects across the web. Alternatively, you can suppress the list and instead send a different offer to prospects who are not yet in your CRM.
Lookalike Modeling: Provide 25,000 records of your best customers and we will provide you with millions of records that look like them all within 72 hours. Select how deep in the model you would like to test to reach records that look like and behave like your best customers.
Identity Linkage: If you would like to get a clear view of your customers across different devices, we can help build out your identity graph thanks to our cross-device data feeds. With identity linkage, marketers can combine the identity graph data with their first-party data in order to get the best out of both third-party and first-party worlds. We go into more detail on the benefits of identity graphs in our blog >
Getting started with cookieless targeting
Digital advertising is constantly evolving and this latest move away from third-party cookies and IDFAs is likely to be one of many changes the industry will see in the next few years. Evolution like this helps the industry to develop and to diversify.
As a data provider that is constantly looking for new opportunities to bring quality and accurate data to our clients, we'd love to talk about your specific needs and get you started with cookieless targeting solutions. Get in touch with us today!
