How has the Removal of Third-Party Cookies Effected Digital Advertisers? Part 2
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.
