Tracking Digital Campaigns

Identifying your next customers in a cookieless world

The deprecation of third party cookies means that, as a marketer, brand or agency, tracking audiences in programmatic is challenging. Alongside this, targetable audiences are diminishing rapidly, meaning competition between brands is growing fiercer.

There are a number of factors causing the decline of cookies, including privacy settings that now block or limit cookies on browsers such as Safari – the first to remove third-party cookies from its browsers back in 2017 – and Firefox, alongside the growth of privacy-focused browsers; ad blockers that interfere with cookie tracking, making it harder for advertisers to gather data on user behaviour; browsing in incognito mode, which prevents cookies from being stored; and changing regulations from governments and regulatory bodies which are introducing stricter privacy laws that limit the use of cookies and other tracking technologies.

Why less cookies equal greater challenges for marketers

As third party cookies decline, it’s increasingly harder for marketers, brands and agencies to successfully track audiences and measure the outcomes and performance of their programmatic campaigns. It is more difficult to track user behaviour across different websites, limiting the ability to deliver highly personalised ads; and less targeted ads may lead to lower click through and conversion rates.

Without cookies, there is no impression-level data so it’s harder to track customer journeys and accurately attribute conversions to specific marketing channels, while without precise attribution, measuring the return on investment for marketing efforts becomes more complex. Fewer data points make it harder to create detailed audience segments based on interests, demographics, and behaviours, and without these, targeting efforts become less effective.

Some analytics tools rely heavily on cookies for data collection, leading to potential inaccuracies in reporting, and limited data can hinder marketers' ability to gain valuable insights into customer behaviour and campaign performance.

There is also the increased complexity of navigating changing privacy regulations and implementing new data collection methods, which can be time-consuming and complex, while non-compliance with privacy laws can result in hefty fines and damage to a brand's reputation.

Finally, the use of walled garden analytics – that of the data collection and analysis practices within closed ecosystems controlled by a single entity – also make it difficult to attribute sales across different advertising channels i.e. programmatic vs Meta vs search.

The number of sales claimed from each platform by their own analytics often add up to more than the total sales generated on a website, making it challenging for external parties to access or analyse the data within them – although GA4 and Meta’s new attribution options are going some way to limiting these challenges. It’s well worth researching the latest articles as the industry moves quickly, with new releases being made all the time by the big ad platforms.

What can marketeers do?

From a brand perspective, all of this means that tracking where audiences are coming from is getting harder and yet, being able to track digital campaigns back to the individual is incredibly valuable.

To address these challenges, marketers, brands and agencies are increasingly adopting alternative strategies that include collecting and leveraging first party data directly from customers; obtaining explicit user consent for data collection and advertising; targeting ads based on the content of the page rather than user behaviour; using privacy-preserving technologies like differential privacy and federated learning to protect user privacy while enabling data analysis; and exploring new attribution models and measurement tools that don't rely on cookies.

Forward-thinking agencies have been busy helping clients with the challenges of cookie deprecation by developing their own cookieless solutions or working with partners like Sagacity to help their clients succeed despite cookie challenges.

Implementing a cookieless solution in programmatic advertising activities not only allows marketers, brands and agencies to better measure the performance of a campaign, it’s also future proof. This kind of solution puts the individual first – offering targeted advertising while respecting user privacy.

Sagacity’s digital marketing solution enables marketers, brands and agencies to track the user back to the individual, by enabling the brand to select the audience based on real world knowledge of who they are, and target them specifically.

By knowing exactly who has been targeted, it is possible to see the results – e.g. the number of people that converted – and analyse a campaign’s success and how powerful that marketing channel is.

How to implement a cookieless solution

Sagacity’s fully permissioned data can be leveraged to not only reach people via direct mail (DM) but also to reach the right people in the digital world, thus targeting both the people receiving DM and further expanding an audience via digital means. For brands and agencies, Sagacity’s digital data can be leveraged as a tactic within their broader client marketing strategies.

Epsilon are market leaders when it comes to identity and activating personal IDs on the open web in the form of display advertising. Sagacity’s partnership with Epsilon helps brands and agencies to find the people they want to target online based on Sagacity’s first party data, and with more than 30 million person level IDs in the UK, Epsilon has match rates of 75% into the open web.

Epsilon’s publisher network helps it identify consumers across environments, including browsers like Safari, Firefox, and iOS in-app, where cookies are limited, but 50% of browsing behavior still occurs.

Sagacity is able to manage measurement in two ways: firstly, DM vs. DM and digital, and secondly, digital-only vs. digital holdout. Epsilon sends impression level data for Sagacity to link back to the sales data that they’ll receive from the brand, thus enabling the brand or agency to understand the incremental impact of sales that occur both online and offline.

This means that brands and agencies will have transparency into the performance of their advertising; can understand the incremental difference that the activity has had; and have visibility across online and offline sales i.e. closed loop reporting.

With standard display advertising, vendors often don’t know if they’re targeting a brand’s best customer or a new prospect, or whether it is the same person on a different device, resulting in an inefficient approach with lots of wastage. By utilising Sagacity’s data with Epsilon’s identity graph to unify data around individual customer identities, brands and agencies will know that they’re targeting the right person. This leads to a more efficient approach and ultimately a better business outcome in the form of provable incremental revenue.

With a people-centred, cookieless approach to programmatic, brands and agencies can reach actual customers and best-fit prospects, with a future-proof solution that ensures marketers can overcome the challenges of programmatic advertising in a world of declining third party cookies.