Attributing conversions to digital ads is vital for any ecommerce vendor in 2021—it’s nearly impossible to improve your approach if you don’t know what your customers are responding to in the first place. Many advertisers have grown accustomed to a multi-touch attribution model, which attempts to identify the contribution of each touchpoint to an eventual sale.
Multi-touch attribution was widely considered an improvement on earlier forms of attributing sales. Last-click attribution, for example, gave full credit for each sale to the last engagement before the customer followed through with the purchase. While this strategy had some merit, it obviously lost a lot of nuance and made attribution far too unreliable to be used effectively.
Unfortunately, the loss of third-party cookies will make multi-touch attribution much less insightful—at least outside of platforms like Facebook, Google, and Amazon that offer centralized user data. Marketers will have to come up with new ways to measure the efficacy of each interaction and form of content.
Ad Targeting
Similarly, third-party cookies have played a fundamental role in digital ad targeting for years. A third-party cookie placed on one site can track a user across the internet and be used for retargeting later on. This was one of the main sources of ad targeting data for a decade or longer.
While cookies going away doesn’t make it impossible to target ads effectively, it adds significant new barriers that marketers will have to find new ways to overcome. Advertisers who crack the code of targeting ads without tracking cookies will be able to transition more seamlessly to a cookieless future.
How to Prepare an Ecommerce Business for Cookieless Tracking
Cookies were the center of online attribution efforts for more than a decade, and the future of ecommerce tracking remains uncertain. How marketers respond to the end of cookies will determine their success (or failure) in a world without cookie targeting.
First-Party Data
The most straightforward solution to the loss of third-party homeowner database cookies is simply to rely on your own data. While first-party data is more limited in scope than information gathered through third-party cookies, it can still contribute to both attribution and ad targeting.
Since businesses will be relying on internal data, the end of tracking cookies will likely lead to a greater gap between small businesses and larger enterprises. Walled gardens like Google and Facebook are even more valuable when marketers don’t have access to third-party data.
Effective first-party data gathering depends on strong performance across opt-in channels like email, SMS, and push notifications. These engagements aren’t affected by the loss of third-party cookies, so we expect to see a renewed focus on opt-in channels over the next several years.
While first-party data collection is still allowed by all major browsers, it is also regulated by the GDPR, CCPA, and other pieces of legislation. With that in mind, it’s crucial to ensure that your information gathering practices follow all relevant guidelines and don’t put your business at risk of noncompliance.