By Catherine Waddell 
Today, many companies are worried about the changes occurring in digital marketing. The basic concern is the third-party cookieless digital marketing. In the last few decades, business companies collect massive data to build their marketing strategies, make decisions as well as target the audience. Cookies helped a lot of companies to stand fearlessly in the marketplace.
As decisions were already taken by various digital platforms to ban these third-party cookies. Businesses are under stress by hearing this news. This is not surprising news, in recent years google had announced the elimination of cookies. likewise strategy applied by apple devices also. All this is happening due to the increased demand for users’ privacy and data protection.
Now, the question is raised by digital marketers and researchers, what should be the future of website advertisements in the post third party cookie world?
Before we discuss this question first we discuss the meaning of “Cookies” in simple words.
Table of Contents
What Does the Term “Third-party Cookie” Mean?
As the term third-party cookies suggest, it means those cookies which are created as well as placed by third-party websites rather than first-party websites.
To understand better, consider you’re visiting a website and suddenly you see a bar comes up for you with some options ‘allow cookies’ or ‘accept cookies’ those cookies are called third-party cookies.
Third-party cookies collect user data to provide a better user experience as well as for marketers, it gives the opportunity to analyze the market.
Cookies help marketers to make updated and new strategies to coop the market competition and to make the business more successful.
What is the Use of Third-Party Cookies?
Third-party cookies are used for various purposes like:
- To track the site: Third-party cookies track the site and collect the user’s browsing data from more than one site. Browsing data is used to analyze the user’s activity.
- To retarget users: after the successful tracking of user activity, the next work of these cookies is to retarget the user with the help of product ads and visuals of their interest.
- Serving ads to users: it helps to serve ads and to make decisions to serve ads that will appear on the website. Along these, they help in the collection of user data for marketers.
How do Third-Party Cookies Exactly Work?
Third-party cookies work by collecting browsing data from users’ browsing sessions. As the stateless protocols don’t store any data from browsing sessions, these third party cookies use such protocols to collect the data. Stateless protocols are the HTTP that we see on the search bar of the browser. These third-party cookies use javascript or embed it to explore it from one website to another.
Reason Behind the Cookieless Structure
The main reason behind the elimination of third-party cookies is the increasing demand for user privacy. Due to the reason of privacy protection Apple eliminated such third party cookies.
Google is also doing so. But we have to think that without third party cookies how will digital marketers make their business strategies. How businesses provide content or products of user interest.
Another simple reason to eliminate the third-party cookies is the benefit of such elimination. Google and Apple are able to get direct connections with the customers they will make their business with.
Impact of Third-Party Cookie Elimination
One of the studies says that about 87% of digital advertisers completely depend on third-party cookies. More than 60% of them are feeling helpless about this elimination.
Here are some aspects which will be impacted most after this elimination
As about 80% of digital marketers depend upon the cookies to make their strategies, if this elimination takes place completely then they have to find some other sources to reach their potential customers. Such kinds of advertisers have to find other sources of data collection.
Elimination of third-party cookies also affects the limit of browsing data. This will create difficulty for digital advertisers.
a/b testing and the frequency capping happens to be challenging for those advertisers who directly depend on cookies.
This elimination also affects the overall performance management as the problem occurs in analytics, and attribution of the business.
Even though some of the digital advertisers are prepared for this challenge.
Replacement of Third Party Cookies
There is no clear replacement for third party cookies yet. Digital advertisers have to plan or innovate new ideas to identify user preferences.
All such marketers will have to make some effort for gather the user data instead of using cookies. Options like identifiers are available to help them.
Identifiers help to collect user preferences so as to make new strategies, performance increments as well as campaign optimization.
Along with all the above mentioned things, many marketers are planning to build new techniques by introducing partnership with other techno related companies.
Solutions for cookieless future
There are newly available solutions for the cookieless future. These solutions aim to replace the third party cookies for the advertisers.
These open sources are unified id 2.0, xandr, and other trade desks solutions. Trade desk solutions build open sources such as unified id 2.0, liveramps ats and neustars fabric id.
Get to Know Unified id 2.0
This is the newest method of replacing third party cookies. Unified id 2.0 collaboratively works with exchanging industries like xandr. Basically unified id 2.0 works as an identifier maintaining user privacy.
An identifier uses an email address to login. Users are able to get free access to the website without having any privacy related issue as its security feature is much stronger. It can also be automated by using the partnership of these identifiers. These can be automatically logged in by the user without having any technical issue.
Conclusion
“Necessity is the mother of innovation” similar to this line today, many of the digital marketers are busy in research and innovation for cookie replacement. Cookieless future is the opportunity for many identifiers.
Digital advertisers have to innovate some other techniques to collect user data. This data is used to plan various strategies and to grow the marketing business.