Digital marketing strategy in a cookie-less world.

Do third-party cookies collect useful information?

When a user visits site A and then site B, third-party cookies ‘follow’ them and send that information to the third party that created the cookie. When you visit a website and you see the well-known cookie notification, you get several options to approve or reject, and these always include an option for third-party cookies. This cookie will, for example, deliver a targeted advertisement, but it can also collect even more information to show you an even better-targeted ad when you visit a subsequent website.

Third-party cookies are not just for advertising.

Of course advertisers are big users of third-party cookies, but what those cookies essentially do is build up a rich user profile. That, of course, helps in targeting ads. We have all experienced seeing an advert for exactly what we were looking for. But it’s not just about ads: you also improve someone’s user experience if you can show a visitor exactly what they came for.

But third-party cookies are being blocked more and more.

In our view this is good news for the consumer, but at the same time a challenge for organisations. The shift to a stricter privacy policy, GDPR, ITP and increasing criticism from people has meant that more and more browsers are already blocking third-party cookies. Firefox and Safari have been blocking third-party cookies for quite some time, but Google has now indicated that by 2023 their Chrome browser will also block third-party cookies.

Not only commercial companies advertise, charities do too. We all know that (targeted) advertising has an effect. If all major browsers block third-party cookies, you will no longer be able to do the following with major advertising platforms like Facebook:

• Audience targeting and retargeting are no longer possible: With Audience targeting, ads are matched to data profiles with socio-demographic, geographic, behavioural, interest and/or intention variables. With retargeting visitors are reached who have already visited certain pages of your website.
• You can no longer set frequency capping: Frequency capping allows you to limit the number of times a user sees the same ad. Because of the disappearance of cookies, one-to-one frequency capping will no longer be possible, which will increase campaign costs and cause the ad to be seen multiple times by the consumer.
• You will no longer be able to measure ad results: To make decisions about which ads to display on a website, impression pixels and click trackers were used. These track how often an ad is displayed and how often it is clicked on. Because this uses third-party cookies, it will soon no longer be possible to measure the impact of the purchased impression and attribute a conversion to a click.

Build a user profile in your own CRM system.

The disappearance of the third-party cookie should be a signal to review your strategy and think about how you can manage user data yourself. There are powerful alternatives with which you can also build up a rich user profile and which comply with the legislation. You can do that with first-party cookies, e-mail addresses, other login IDs and contextual targeting, for example.

CRM Onboarding as a replacement for third-party cookies.

With CRM onboarding, you build up first-party user data in your CRM platform. Your visitors log into your website with their (frequently used) e-mail address and give permission for their interests to be recorded. With a digital marketing platform such as Marketing Cloud, you can map out the interests of the individual user.

If your visitors use the same email address to log in to Facebook, for example, or are logged in to their Chrome browser with that email address, the platform recognises them in an anonymised way and you can (re)target them accordingly.

Using the same principle, you can also prevent existing customers from receiving an ad to become a customer. For example, you can approach these existing supporters with an advertisement to drive their first donation. This is less irritating for your constituents and lowers the costs of your acquisition campaign.