Apr 14, 2021 Marketing Analytics – The Death of Cookies and What It Means to Marketers
Marketing Cookies (AKA Tracking Cookies) are going away by January 2022 (thank goodness, not the cookies we eat). Google is removing this from the Chrome browser and will no longer pass this information or any individual identity information to marketers. This follows actions already taken by Apple and others. Marketing Cookies are little snippets of code that allow marketers to track the behavior of users and the activities they conduct across the internet. They have been a critical component of attribution analysis. This is used my marketers to follow prospective customers through their buying journey and then by applying advanced statistical techniques, to determine what touch points had the most influence on an eventual call to action (a purchase or other conversion opportunity). This allows marketers to make adjustments to the journey to improve the customer experience and to move advertising spend to those events most likely to facilitate a conversion.
Marketers currently get this data from Google tools such as Google Analytics, put it through an identity process to match it up with data they already have from other sources such as past purchase history, downloads of white papers or other digital provided information of value to prospective customers, customer relationship management systems, and other credit and consumer data form commercially available data sources. The Google data will no longer be available.
In its place, Google is going to create cohorts of users (called FLoCs) based on online behavior and allow marketers to market to the cohorts using Google products such as Google Ads (AdWords).
So, marketers need to take action in 2021 to start using these new FLoCs while customer identity information is still available, learning how to use this new data and reset their expectations on performance, and baselines.
In my next post, I am going to discuss the newly important role Universal Identifiers (UIDs) will play in all of this and how marketers need to identify and use more strategically their first party interactions requiring logon and authentication.
Bryan B Mason
Apollo Consulting Group, Newport, RI
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