Archives 2022

How have changes effected advertisers? 

Big changes swept through the digital advertising world this year due to the removal of third-party cookies. When all major browsers stopped supporting third-party cookies, it became impossible to set up audience targeting and frequency capping for 99% of users. Meanwhile, cross-site audience targeting became a thing of the past. Non-personalised ads have begun to overflow the Internet, and the effectiveness of advertising campaigns (ROAS) decreased.

Orchid Richardson, vice president of programmatic and data centre at Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), says that brands turned out to be the least prepared to disable third-party cookies. She claims that advertisers have taken a wait-and-see approach, hoping that someone will come up with an alternative solution for them.

At the same time, the most forward-thinking direct-to-consumer brands have already started activating first-party user data from CRM, CDP platforms, and offline contacts in their advertising campaigns. This allows them to customise retargeting and to sell more products to loyal users.

Advertisers have started collecting and segmenting user data right extensively. Given that this may require new ad technologies (such as a data management platform [DMP] or a creative management platform [CMP], companies need to find a reliable technology partner to help them with customisation and integration.

What happened to web publishers? 

A recent IAB report revealed that publishers could lose up to $10 billion in ad revenue when third-party cookies are disabled because their ad personalisation options will shrink. According to Google’s research, most publishers could lose 50-70% of their revenue if they don’t reconfigure their approach to ad and data management by 2022.

Why will revenues decrease?

• Brands will redirect advertising budgets to sites with their own authorisation systems that collect and consistently process user data. This includes large technology platforms such as Facebook, Amazon, YouTube, as well as media houses that receive user data after registration.
• Media buying based on CPC (cost-per-click) and CPA (cost-per-action) models will become more popular since they don’t require control over reach and frequency. Nevertheless, such models are less profitable for publishers.
• Advertisers will have less trust in the programmatic ecosystem due to the potential increase in traffic fraud until verification systems are rebuilt to work without third-party cookies.
• Part of the budgets can spill into mobile advertising on Android devices, where targeting options haven’t been limited yet. Apple has already restricted user tracking in iOS14.

Contact us today to start a digital advertising campaign that adapts to the recent cookie changes and helps your business meet its revenue goals.

Cookies used to be a highly effective digital marketing tool. Now that they are gone, what impact has that made on digital advertisers? Chrome and Chromium-based browsers stopped supporting third-party cookies in 2022, which effected everyone in the advertising industry. Traditional digital advertising and monetization methods have become less effective or even stopped working altogether as a result.

In this article, we explain why third-party cookies were canceled, how this will affect publishers and advertisers, and what you need to do now so that these changes won’t affect your ad revenue.

Why did third-party cookies go away?

Third-party cookies are online user identifiers that are set by a third-party platform or technology provider on the website the user is visiting. Cookies are stored on the user’s device. Brands have long used third-party cookies to track website visitors, improve user experience, and collect data to target ads to the right audience. The main advantage of third-party cookies for advertisers was that they enabled the tracking of what users were browsing throughout the entire web within a specific browser, not just on the site on which these cookies had been installed.

The third-party cookies cancellation is due to the users’ growing distrust of third-party cookies. The latter doesn’t allow the users to control where and how their personally identifiable information or PII is used.

“Users are demanding greater privacy—including transparency, choice, and control over how their data is used — and it’s clear the web ecosystem needs to evolve to meet these increasing demands,” Google announced in a blog post on March 3, 2021.

That’s also the goal of the data protection regulations created over the past 5 years (for example, the GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in California). One of their main purposes is to inform users about what data is being used and allow them to choose who to entrust their data to.

Although Chrome is not the first browser to disable third-party cookies, it has the highest market share at 64% of all users. Safari (ranked second) and Firefox (ranked third) stopped tracking users via third-party cookies over a year ago.

It’s worth remembering that not all types of cookies have been disabled. First-party cookies, which are created by the publisher or advertiser and are not transferred to third parties, will stay in place. Their purpose is to facilitate interaction with the user: remember passwords, search preferences, purchase history, recommendations, items saved in the cart, etc.

Private messaging is having a huge impact on digital marketing. Recent surveys of prospects show customers prefer that form of communication with the brands they like. 60% of EU customers and 51% of US customers prefer messaging over email or phone calls as they believe it is faster and more convenient.

This is according to a study by Spectrm, a marketing platform businesses use to automate one-to-one conversations with consumers on messaging channels.

The State of Social Conversational Commerce report surveyed 1,726 consumers: 780 from the EU and 946 from the U.S. with the purpose of better understanding their experiences messaging with brands, if messaging led to them purchasing a product, their thoughts on privacy and data collection, and more.

Max Koziolek, CEO of Spectrm, said, “We found private messaging has a profound impact on brand affinity and sales, more than most marketers may be aware. While conversational commerce has been growing in popularity for a few years, many brands limit their conversations only to chatbots on their websites. Our report’s findings shed light on why this is the wrong way to think about conversational commerce. Instead, consumers want to engage with your brand in the same way they’re already communicating with their friends: through private messaging on Messenger, Instagram DMs or WhatsApp.”

Other key Findings include:

• 81% of EU respondents and 78% of US respondents said they would be comfortable giving preferences to a brand in a private and safe way, to receive a more personalised experience.
• 67% of EU respondents and 52% of US respondents have messaged with a company on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp.
• 53% of EU respondents and 43% of US respondents have clicked on a Click to Messenger ad.

If your digital marketing strategy does not include private messaging, then you are making a mistake. Contact us today for a private messaging campaign that works.