A cookie-less world is fast approaching. While customers might be rejoicing about this new future for obvious privacy reasons, the uncertainty is agonizing for digital marketers and advertisers. It will become harder to track online journeys. This will impair their ability to monitor engagement, such as how many times a user encountered an ad or where, is surely going to impact their ad quality, consumption, and revenue. So, what’s the alternative?
A World Without Third-Party Cookies Is Not Going to Be Easy for Advertisers
In today’s highly competitive world, generic marketing is no longer effective. Thankfully, every marketer realizes that and uses different ways and means to target audiences at the right place, at the right time, and using the right channel. Offering marketing content to customers when they are ready to take action is a great way to drive conversions. And third-party cookies have helped them in several ways.
These cookies have enabled advertisers to get a detailed understanding of who their customers are and what their needs are. Such insight has enabled them to curate and deliver relevant advertising and marketing content, improving engagement and offerings and, thus, revenue and profitability.
For decades, data collected by third-party cookies have been a treasure trove of customer information. It has helped digital marketers target and reach out to users with relevant messaging and content.
But as consumers become increasingly apprehensive about their movements being tracked and their data being collected, the world is up for a cookie-less future. A combination of emerging privacy policies, regulatory interventions, and changing user behavior is soon going to lead to the end of third-party tracking cookies.
Marketing without cookies might be worrying for many and rightfully so. With hundreds of competing priorities, advertising without cookies can greatly impact the efficiency and effectiveness of brands’ targeting and retargeting efforts. This new future will lead to several fundamental changes for a whole ecosystem of advertisers, publishers, and agencies. For those whose entire business models are based on third-party tracking cookies, it might also lead to a substantial loss in revenue – or even a shutdown!
But Cohort-Based Advertising Offers a Compelling Alternative to Third-Party Cookies
With laws such as GDPR becoming more stringent, advertisers are compelled to think of new ways to engage audiences. Without insights generated from third-party cookies, they are being pushed to reimagine their engagement tactics and fuel the same level of personalization.
Cohort-based advertising allows marketers to target anonymous groups of people with common interests and online behavior. From demography and ethnicity to credit scores and income range indicators, these cohorts aid in personalized targeting and tailored messaging.
Instead of monitoring the online (and offline) behavior of individual customers, cohort-based advertising tracks the preferences and inclinations of different groups of like-minded users. Advertisers will have access to and visibility of such cohorts, which they can then use to target the target segments of their choice.
In a cookie-less world, cohort-based advertising offers several benefits. These include the ability to:
1. Predict Customer Behavior
Audiences, when grouped in cohorts, offer several critical insights into the needs of customers. Analyzing and evaluating these cohorts can enable advertisers to better understand customer preferences and predict their behavior – based on their previous purchases and their current interests.
2. Maintain Compliance
As the marketing industry moves toward a privacy-first, cookie-less future, cohorts represent an effective go-to approach for brands looking to maintain compliance. In today’s era of limited digital surveillance, cohort-based advertising ensures compliance with emerging privacy regulations, enabling companies to set new standards for data privacy around the world.
3. Drive Top-of-the-Funnel Marketing
Brands collect valuable first-party data about their customers. Yet, most of this data is locked in internal silos and is subject to extreme privacy restrictions. Cohort advertising enables marketers to consolidate this first-party data and power effective upper-funnel activity. It allows them to bring in online and offline data and fill in knowledge gaps – thus improving marketing analytics and boosting omnichannel campaign performance.
Seamlessly Transition from Cookies to Cohorts with Aroscop
Despite growing data privacy concerns, customers continue to expect tailored marketing messages and content. Although cookies offered advertisers several customer-centric ways to fuel engagement, companies have been successfully marketing long before cookies even existed.
The absence of third-party cookies is surely going to make it difficult, but not impossible. Cohort-based advertising offers a great alternative to present-day advertisers and marketers – allowing them to strike the right balance between personalization and privacy.
As the marketing landscape undergoes a radical transformation, now is the time to embrace cohort-based advertising to improve targeting and conversions. As a future-ready programmatic advertising company, Aroscop can help you seamlessly transition from cookies to cohorts. Combining advanced programmatic ad serving, RTB, and data science technologies, we can help you make the most of first-party customer data in a privacy-safe manner.
Contact us to know more.
