The future of cookies

The future of cookies

Who has not considered what will happen to the digital ecosystem as a result of the so-called news of the blocking of third-party cookies in browsers? A few days ago, a Google Attribution, Measurement and Omnichannel specialist, commented the following about the digital environment and the treatment of audiences: “We have lived in the Wild West”. We can not agree more. That is why we understand that the digital market, and with it the treatment of user information, is undergoing so many changes. First of all, it is essential to know the difference between own and third-party cookies. The 1st party cookies are those collected directly by the main server and the 3rd party cookies that are collected in the publisher’s landing but are sent to third-party servers, such as Campaign Manager or Facebook. Once the difference between the two is understood, the epicenter of the problem arises when Google communicates that in 2022 it will block third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. The industry, directly and indirectly, is urgently demanding a change in the digital market and with it in the treatment of data. This demand translates into three main premises :

1. Users: the user has stated that they do not want us to control them and that is why they browse incognito or even take time to download Ad Blockers.
2. Regulation: increasingly restrictive consent laws such as GDPR, ePrivacy Directive, CCPA, IAB transparency & Consent Framework, ECJ Planet49 case, National DPAs announcements. Increasingly strict regulations on the treatment of user data and with it, the collection of cookies.
3. Technology: as we know, ITP (Safari) and ETP (Firefox) by default block third-party cookies and as we have commented previously, Chrome adds to this construction of a more private web environment.

 

Why should we care? How is it going to affect us?

This new digital ecosystem is going to require an adaptation process because it will mean a change in the way we measure the data of our business and of each client. In addition, certain functionalities of our technologies will be altered.

1. Audiences: The collection of audiences such as tag-based audiences (Campaign Manager floodlight), frequency cap and DMP audiences will be affected. This will increase the importance of the 1st party data that each client has stored in addition to its activation.
2. The personalization of the content of the ads will also be affected.
3. Increase the pressure on the measurement, reporting and attribution of conversions. Reports such as the identification of unique users and overlap will be limited.
4. The optimization strategies such as CPA or bid to maximize conversions will also be affected by lower volume cookies will experience platforms.

 

Today’s solutions

We must take into account this new digital context with limited cookies and begin to delve into possible qualified solutions that we already have at our disposal. The Google Marketing Platform ecosystem offers us extensive advanced solutions that we are also already exploiting today.

1. Google audiences like Affinity and In Market: Google will continue to have a broad reach of users based on their affinities and purchasing interests.
2. Programmatic Deals through Display & Video 360: with guaranteed programmatic agreements and other types of deals such as Preferred and Private, we can reach our target audience, thanks to the segmentations offered by the different media.
3. Offline conversions: the GMP ecosystem allows us to import offline conversions, so this solution would allow us to obtain greater visibility on the platform of our user’s behavior and make more beneficial decisions.
4. Customer Match: creation of audiences based on the uploading of databases of our users to platforms such as Display & Video 360 and Google Ads.
5. Ads Data Hub:  A tool that allows you to send 1st party data to BigQuery and analyze it against the campaign data. One of the objectives of this tool is to create highly qualified audiences but in groups of at least 50 users, in order to maintain the qualification of the data without losing the user’s privacy.
6. Server to Server: in this case a server, such as the Tag Manager Server, directly receives the information from the DataLayer from the web, stores and processes this information in order to subsequently send it to Google Analytics.
7. Finally, the disappearance of the 3rd party cookies will not affect all contexts. Neither mobile nor Smart TV will be affected, so we also recommend exploiting these other types of environments that are also booming in the current digital ecosystem.

We are aware that this new ecosystem still has many unknowns and therefore we recommend taking time to establish a solid strategy based on it. Google is said to start testing in 2020, so we have time to catch up!