In these already challenging corona times, online advertisers and publishers will soon face an even greater challenge. Cookieless advertising is getting close as browsers are blocking third-party cookies one by one. Until now, these types of cookies have been the norm for campaign tracking, user tracking and showing personalized ads based on website behavior and retargeting. Now that the expiration date of this technique has been reached, the question arises: where to go from here? We dived into the matter and found out what will change and what will still be possible in the near future when cookie-free advertising becomes the norm.
What are cookies and what can you do with them?
In case you don't have much experience with online advertising, then it's good if we start with the basics.
Cookies are data files stored in a user's browser of a user, allowing that user to be identified as an individual individual. Say you visit Bol.com and check out some books, at that moment Bol.com Bol.com places such a cookie in your browser in which they track exactly what you do on their website. Based on this they remember the "products you previously viewed" and the contents of your shopping cart, so that on your next visit look exactly the same. This data is only exchanged between Bol.com and your browser and is called first party cookies. In this way Bol.com collects own data, with which they can map your behaviour as a user and provide a good user experience. provide a good user experience. Bol.com remembers for you what is in your shopping cart or what your password is. Very handy!
However, there are also other types of cookies: so-called third party cookies. In this case Bol.com, for example, places its cookies (often via a tech party) on websites like AD.nl or Nu.nl in order to identify you and, based on your surfing habits in the webshop, to show you ads for products you have products that you have viewed (retargeting), or other products that they consider relevant to you based on your behavior on their website. This way Bol.com can also track the websites through which you interacted with ads and what you subsequently and what you subsequently did or bought on their website.
Whether they are first party or third party cookies, they are all stored in the user's browser and therefore it is possible to identify the same user on both the websites of publishers' and advertiser's websites.
Third party cookies are useful to advertisers & publishers to track users, personalize ads and measure campaigns. But users/consumers want privacy and not to be tracked. Relevant ads are desirable, personalized ads are scary.
The trend: by 2022, third-party cookies will be worth nothing
Firefox and Safari have been blocking third-party cookies for some time. For many advertisers and publishers in the Netherlands, this was not a major obstacle. Together these browsers have a market share of 30%, of which Safari is mainly on mobile (iPhone). But now that Google Chrome, with a market share of 55%, has also announced that it will not allow third-party cookies in 2022, it becomes important to adapt to this situation. And to find an alternative to campaigns on the cookieless Internet.
In addition, Apple is now going a step further by limiting the storage of first-party cookies to one week. In addition, they have announced they will start blocking advertising tracking by default starting in iOS14 (first months of 2021). This means that advertisers and also companies like Facebook, will no longer be able to track iPhone users without explicit consent. For Facebook, this mainly affects their advertising activities on the audience network, the websites on which Facebook relays ads, because they can no longer link visitors from these to their logged-in Facebook or Instagram users. For publishers in the audience network, they expect a drop in revenue of up to 50%.
Why do browsers do that and cookies become worthless?
This has everything to do with a trend that has been going on for several years. Consumers increasingly want to protect their privacy and no longer want to share everything with everyone (read: tech companies and advertisers). To this end, they install cookie and adblockers, for example.
With the AVG law that went into effect in 2018, they will be actually better protected as well. As a company, you are no longer allowed to store the behavior of your visitors without their consent. Since then, we have also seen that consumers are less and less likely to give permission to set cookies. About 30% to 60% of website visitors refuse to do so.
This call from consumers to regain control
over their data and not be tracked by advertisers, is also being heard
by tech companies like Apple and Google.
In short, we are moving more and more toward a world where consumer desires are
central, and that means transparency and privacy by default. And that has
impact on campaigns.
The future of online advertising
With the disappearance of cookies, a central problem arises: how can you still identify the individual without cookies? This poses problems in two areas:
- Delivery and read-through campaigns.
- Campaign targeting
Fortunately, there are plenty of solutions for cookie-less targeting that certainly keep relevant campaigns possible.
From personalized ads to relevant ads
The idea of retargeting was a good one. You reach someone who has already expressed interest again to convince them to purchase. purchase. The underlying principle: personalized ads are more effective than generic ads.
Retargeting will become more difficult, if not impossible, without new techniques. The question, however, is whether this is a bad thing. Consumers have been annoyed for years about retargeting that often seems to go on endlessly, even if you have already purchased a product has already been purchased, or very deliberately not and haven't looked at it.
The power of personalized ads is perhaps also overrated. The international "In Brands We Trust 2020 Survey in fact, shows that only 24% of consumers see the value of personalization and 15% have actually experienced the added value of sharing data experienced. In general, people don't want personalization, which raises questions about privacy, but they do want relevance.
Necessarily abandoning retargeting really doesn't mean that you have to go back to shooting with hail, resulting in a lot of strategic waste of ad budget as a result. There are plenty of other opportunities to reach your target audience.
First, more effort will need to be put into building of the brand (branding) and reaching new potential customers (prospecting). If done right, prospecting and branding will have a more positive effect than with retargeting. It was always thought that personalized retargeting ads produced better performance (read: sales) results because they would be more relevant. But you can also build relevance by showing a general ad about your brand at a relevant time (e.g. time targeting snacks between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m.) or in a relevant context (baby food to someone looking for baby clothes). In other words, good old context targeting.
Solutions for cookieless (re)targeting
While it may seem impossible, there are certainly still opportunities to reach your target audience with relevant ads on a cookieless web.
1. Context targeting
Context - and then both the context of the ad on a website and the physical context in which the consumer is located (for example, weather, location or time) - is the key to relevant campaigns. That way, perhaps better than personalization, you can connect with your target audience.
2. Use of CRM Data & Customer Matching.
Customer matching based on email or phone number, if collected AVG-proof, offers an alternative to retargeting and is possible with all major global players, such as Facebook, Snapchat and Google. Increasingly, local parties such as DPG Media and Marktplaats, for example, are also offering this option.
3. (Intent) data from Facebook and Google.
Data from global players like Facebook and Google regarding in-market audiences (people who are literally in the market for your type of product) and affinity becomes even more important and valuable because it is collected in a closed environment.
4. Data from local publishers
Local Publishers in the Netherlands, however, are not sitting still and developing data propositions.
Both in terms of context targeting and profiling visitors based what they read, or even in-market data. For example, on sports sites you can also reach people interested in cooking.
The disadvantage is that the scale of a publisher is smaller than that of global players. This makes it impossible for the deployment of one website or even a network of websites to replace the deployment of, say, Facebook and achieve the same reach. Facebook has 10 million users of which 8 million log in daily. This means that through Facebook you can reach 88% of the Netherlands on a monthly basis. With the largest local network DPG Media you can reach 76% of the Netherlands (13+) per month reach and their daily reach is at 37%. That of Facebook is at 70%.
5. Know your target audience
Whichever targeting solution you choose, cookie-proof advertising starts with knowing your target audience. Good audience research can also make up for the possible lack of retargeting. If you know your target audience very well, know what concerns them and where they are, you can still show super-relevant ads.
Want to know more?
Want to learn more about these cookie-free advertising solutions and be well prepared to enter the cookie-less advertising era? Then request our white paper now via contact@stroom.com. In this whitepaper we put it all together!