Scenarios and possible developments
Google has declared that by the second half of 2024 its Chrome browser, used by 65% of users, will no longer support third-party cookies, thus announcing the end of an era and the start of the Privacy Sandbox project.
Without third-party cookies, it becomes more difficult for advertisers to track and segment users based on their online behavior. This could lead to less accuracy in ad targeting and a greater reliance on other tracking methods, such as self-reported demographics or predictive models.
The possible developments and scenarios to be monitored are as follows:
1. Move towards first-party data: without third-party cookies it becomes essential to exploit first-party data: data collected directly by publishers or the advertising platforms themselves. This data may include demographic, behavioral, and contextual information collected through direct interactions with users.
2. Use alternative identifiers: New forms of alternative identifiers may emerge based on anonymous identities, such as unique IDs, or on other technologies such as probabilistic identifiers.
3. Make use of contextual targeting technologies: Context-based targeting, i.e. the positioning of ads based on the content of the web page on which they are displayed.
4. Partnership: Advertising companies could partner more closely with publishers and other stakeholders to share data and resources to compensate for the loss of tracking capabilities of third-party cookies.
5. Focus on privacy and transparency: Advertising platforms will need to focus on transparency and user consent for the use of their personal data. New standards and regulations may emerge to provide greater protection for online privacy.
The research by Adform and Yougov
Adform, a global programmatic platform, commissioned YouGov to survey sentiment in 11 countries to find out the opinions and certainties of marketing decision makers. The survey was based on a sample of 3,332 managers who purchase programmatic advertising.
In this still poorly defined scenario, the share of Italian cookieless traffic is at 40%, even if 46% of the sample is convinced that it is lower, 30% have no idea what it is and only 5% of managers has identified the right percentage.
Half of the interviewees declare that they do not have a clear idea of how the cookieless era could impact their marketing strategies, without forgetting that 66% know little or nothing about the solutions that are already available on the market.
Although more than half of those interviewed are convinced that identifying the tool to replace third-party cookies is essential to winning successful future campaigns, a similar percentage say they are poorly prepared for this new era. With 39% of respondents having already experienced a negative impact on their digital campaigns due to cookie blocking.
New solutions for Programmatic Adv
In this scenario, Programmatic Advertising must identify alternative ways to better recognize and profile users.
Among the main technologies candidates to replace third-party cookies we find:
• alternative User-IDs
1. they adopt techniques similar to those of fingerprinting, but of a probabilistic nature, detecting similar information and therefore partly running the same risks.
2. they use "hashed" email addresses (cryptographic protection) to which it is possible to associate users' browsing to assign them, in a deterministic way, User IDs. Obviously this association is not always possible, but the Universal ID 2.0 created by The Trade Desk is one of the best known solutions on the market at the moment.
• mobile advertising IDs
The mobile advertising ID can be considered a solution capable of providing useful elements for recognizing users' cross-device and cross-site browsing.
In fact, inside each smartphone there is a unique identifier that replicates the behavior of a third-party cookie and which is called Mobile Advertising Identifier (MAID).
In iOS it is called IDFA, while in Android it is called AAID. The download, but above all the use of apps, can therefore constitute a significant pool of recognition and offer the world of Programmatic an area of development, based on an identifier perhaps more appropriate than third-party cookies themselves, to ride the change.
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