EN
PT
RU
ZH
ES
Cookie-based advertising has been a boon for marketers for a couple of years in the past and has helped advertisers to track, optimize, and manage campaigns; target and retarget visitors; attribute conversions; and segment users. However, growing privacy regulations, stricter compliance mechanisms, evolving user preferences, and browser restrictions have forced marketers to seek better alternative options.
On this note, let us have a quick overview of cookie-based advertising in general:
Cookie-Based Advertising:
Cookie-based advertising is a backbone of advertising techniques that enable marketers to recover lost conversions by tracking users and re-engaging them based on their previous interactions with a website. However, with the passage of time, this practice has lost its sheen and no longer holds relevance in the present marketing landscape. Remarketing has become archaic and is no longer as effective as it once was. This is due to the growing number of mobile devices and browsers that restrict or no longer support cookies. As a result, digital marketers are losing visibility into a significant portion of their audience, making it increasingly difficult to track, engage, and retarget users effectively.
Nowadays, users are continuing to work with multiple devices from various locations. As a result, performance marketers are developing viable non-cookie options for precision tracking of users in online advertising, including mechanisms that monitor how to track app installs and user behavior across different devices and touchpoints.
Flaws in Cookie-Based Advertising & Tracking:
Let us have a brief look at the limitations of cookie-based tracking:
Privacy Constraints:
One of the major limitations of cookie-based advertising is user privacy. Advertisers track consumers' online behavior and collect, store, and use their personal information for marketing purposes. Hence, there is a growing need for user consent, increased transparency, and responsible data handling mechanisms, and businesses need to be more careful in terms of how they track, collect, and process users' personal information.
Businesses are in continuous search for privacy-conscious alternatives, which include handling first-party data, server-side measurement, consent-based tracking, and using analytical tools for granular reporting. They need to evaluate what information is collected, why it is being collected, whether there is appropriate user consent, and the duration for which information is retained.
Browser Restrictions:
Browser restrictions can affect users much more than identifying website visitors. They have a direct bearing on conversion attribution, retargeting, building audience segments, cross-site or cross-browser measurement, campaign optimization, affiliate tracking, and others.
Let us see them one by one:
1. Conversion Attribution:
This metric helps to determine which touchpoint resulted in a specified action, such as app installation, purchase, lead, or form submission, and others. Accurate attribution data is needed to determine which campaigns, affiliates, or ads are producing results. This information helps to discern how different marketing channels are performing, allocate budgets more wisely, optimize campaigns more effectively, get a complete picture of where users are abandoning before converting, and maximize results out of your marketing investment. However, when browsers restrict the cookies or identifiers that are used for this process, then it becomes difficult to relate conversions to the original campaign or actual interactions, making Cross-app attribution and accurate conversion measurement more challenging. Consequently, marketers see incomplete attribution, unattributed conversions, and discrepancies in reports generated by disparate marketing platforms.
2. Retargeting:
The retargeting mechanism involves targeting those audiences again who have already interacted with a website, advertisement, product, or service. For example, a visitor may visit a website to buy running shoes but leave before completing the purchase. Retargeting enables those visitors to purchase those shoes and return in the near future to make more transactions. However, browser restrictions obstruct marketers from clearly distinguishing between transactions made across different browsers and devices, making it harder to accurately track users' journeys and attribute conversions to the appropriate marketing campaigns.
3. Affiliate Tracking:
A tracking mechanism is needed to link an actual conversion to the affiliate who drove it. However, if that attribution depends on third-party cookies and browser identifiers that are restricted, deleted, or unavailable at the time of conversion, then this missing information makes it difficult to establish the connection between the conversion and the affiliate. This situation hampers making the right commission payments and affects the data in the reports, making how to prevent click fraud in affiliate marketing an important consideration for marketers.
4. Campaign Optimization:
Campaign optimization enables determining which campaigns, affiliates, advertisements, and keywords are contributing to real outcomes. Browser restrictions make it harder for advertisers to have a clear picture for making informed optimization decisions. This is why marketers combine browser-based measurement data with server-side data, conversion APIs, consolidated reporting, first-party data, and others.
5. Measuring Cross-Site Interactions:
This approach measures how a customer interacts with multiple touchpoints across their marketing journey. This includes interactions across different websites and marketing channels, enabling actions such as purchases, website registrations, form submissions, and more. As browsers increasingly restrict third-party tracking, it becomes difficult to connect the different touchpoints together to present a bigger and clearer picture of the customer journey. This approach leads to a fragmented customer journey. Hence, marketers depend on other fallback mechanisms such as S2S (server-to-server measurement), first-party identifiers, privacy-based attribution, and aggregate measurement, which help them become less dependent on third-party cookies and rely on a combination of these attribution methods, including Customer journey tracking and a Session tracking platform.
How is Cookie-less tracking effective?
Cookie-less tracking becomes more effective by using alternative tracking methods instead of depending solely on users' browsers and cookies to identify and track their activity. The use of cookieless tracking relies on predefined code that executes when a user visits the site, and this code sends data to servers for secure storage and future audience tracking, supporting app tracking software and other measurement mechanisms.
Cross-platform Cookie-less tracking:
No matter where the user is surfing on the internet, no matter which device he is using, he will be accurately attributed to the site of the advertisement. Most of the advertising platforms are working on the development of cookie-less tracking, including solutions that track mobile campaigns across different devices and environments.
Is It Time to Ditch Cookie-Based Tracking Methods?
Yes, it may be time to transition from cookie-based tracking as the sole tracking method to other alternative mechanisms, but not necessarily to abandon cookies entirely. With growing privacy regulations, browser restrictions, and the gradual deprecation of third-party cookies, marketers need more reliable and privacy-conscious alternatives. Cookie-less tracking helps businesses measure user activity, track conversions, and understand customer journeys without depending entirely on browser cookies. Methods such as server-side tracking, first-party data, fingerprinting, and other privacy-conscious tracking technologies result in deriving valuable insights while adapting to the changing digital landscape.
