There are three main types of data: first, second, and third-party. For advertisers, the former is the holy grail. It's data you collect directly from consumers rather than from another company, often making it more accurate and relevant to your business clients.
The problem is that first-party data collection is harder than ever. Thanks to stringent new data privacy compliance, many internet browsers are banning third-party cookies—small text files that track potential customers across the web. Firefox, Brave, and Safari have already gone "cookieless," and Google Chrome will follow suit this year.
All this makes it difficult to monitor and target consumers as they browse the internet. So, advertising teams should shift to alternative tracking methods before the year's up. As a result, they can continue to collect data about prospects for campaigns in 2025 and beyond.
Audience Targeting
As browsers phase out third-party cookies, targeting audiences through prospecting and remarketing becomes more of a challenge. Without these small files of text, companies are struggling to deliver, measure, attribute, and optimize ad campaigns.
Google's Privacy Sandbox API (formerly Fledge), already available for many Chrome users, might offer some benefits for prospecting when adapting to a cookieless world. It still allows for internet-based advertising while maintaining user privacy, using group data signals rather than individual signals to better anonymize personalized marketing with first-party data.
The downside is that advertisers could need bigger remarketing tools when using Privacy Sandbox, something smaller clients might not be able to afford. There are other issues. Data may be less accurate for more explicit remarketing campaigns, while deeper remarketing themes might not work as well.
It will likely be a couple of years before advertisers know whether Privacy Sandbox provides value. However, moving advertising decisioning into the Chrome browser will definitely impact how teams prospect and remarket.
Conversion Tracking
Marketing without cookies will also impact data collection and attribution when tracking conversions. Currently, publishers are trying to bypass the browser completely or use browser data more privately. AI-driven tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) then "fill in" any gaps in data, while hashed and encrypted data enhances privacy.
Facebook's Conversion API, active for several years now, can help bypass the browser. Google isn't fully bypassing the browser, but it is scrubbing browser data and making it more private through its Privacy Sandbox. Other platforms, mainly used for programmatic, push first-party data and use AI to do all the heavy lifting.
IP tracking might not work in a world without cookies because it feels less private than browser data. It could replace cookies for a little while but expect it to eventually get shut down for privacy reasons.
Post-click conversion tracking could win out over post-click as browsers eliminate cookies. Firstly, the latter is much more difficult for data collection and attribution. Secondly, it often generates publisher data that is wildly different from the data on Google Analytics, even with the understanding that publisher pixel data isn't de-duplicated.
Reporting
Without cookies, reporting suddenly becomes more difficult, especially when gathering highly personalized information about targets. Expect probabilistic attribution to be the norm going forward—something Google already does. This method analyzes user behavior, compares it with your existing data, and evaluates the value of each interaction in the customer journey.
Advertisers should no longer rely on multi-touch attribution (MTA) or post-view data to track business KPIs and overall performance—unless it's helpful for optimization. Instead, there will likely be a shift toward marketing mix modeling (MMM) and holistic measurement, or things will default to click-based attribution in Google Analytics.
How Does This Impact Your Clients and Their Customers?
Not tracking cookies doesn't mean you can't provide clients with the insights they need. You just need to change course.
For example, you won't be able to address a lot of available impressions one-on-one anymore, hurting tactics like retargeting and direct targeting of first-party audiences in low-cost environments. So, consider shifting to probabilistic, contextual, and location targeting in cases where you can't identify a user in the same way as before.
For clients' customers, cookieless certainly provides more privacy. However, platforms are working out new ways to track them, especially those that are likely to convert.
Take Google, for example. It's focusing more on automated remarketing solutions, such as optimized targeting and general smart customer data strategies.
For performance max (PMAX) campaigns, Google combines brand/non-brand terms, remarketing, prospecting, in-market data, and other signals into one automated campaign structure. Facebook is doing a similar thing. While this takes away manual control from skilled advertisers, PMAX campaigns might perform better in the long run.
The biggest unknown is programmatic partners, which seem to be tackling a cookie-less future by pulling in third parties to better match data. Remarketing might be an issue for them.
What Does the Future Hold?
It's difficult to know what will happen as cookies become obsolete—well, cookies as you know them. Publishers are replacing cookies with their own versions of this technology, claiming their alternatives are more "private." However, tracking is still possible—it's just happening through an intermediary API rather than a browser. Will future regulations stop this, too? And how will new technologies affect other advertising tasks, such as CRM integration for data management?
Interestingly, the decline of cookies has led to new technologies that might change how advertisers track targets when preparing for 2025. TTD's UID 2.0 sounds promising, and other IDs based on hashed personally identifiable information (PII) could be good for connected TV (CTV) environments. That said, UID 2.0 requires users to authenticate their website or app, and this technology might not scale across a lot of the open web where people click on articles on social media.
In short, third-party data might be going away and second-party data can be problematic. However, first-party data is here to stay. The way advertisers track it is simply evolving.
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