May 24, 2024

Cookieless future and its impact on marketing

Topics API was a key element of the cookieless future and it will chnage the data landscape for marketers

The move to Cookieless - more specifically no third party cookies is round the corner. Third-party cookies drove online advertising giving advertisers a way to track users across devices across the different sites they visit and leverage programmatic advertising to create audiences. Marketing will need to re-evaluate its approach due to changes by Google and Apple.

However , Google will deprecate third party cookies in 2023 paving the way for its Topics API. Browsers such as Safari and Firefox have already implemented some default blocking against third-party tracking cookies. Apple also improved user privacy standards by changing up its IDFA tracking

So some marketers fear whats next for them as the data landscape is changed forever. Does this mean doomsday or evolution ?

In a recent survey. shared by HubSpot ,

41% of marketers believe their biggest challenge will be their inability to track the right data.

44% of marketers predict a need to increase their spending by 5% to 25% in order to reach the same goals as 2021.

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Marketers need to navigate this transition smartly as they will soon not be able to follow their user across multiple websites. They will need to invest in first party data and use that across its owned channels for better customer retention . Marketers need to immediately assess the mix of first party, second party and third party data and see if the underlying data platform can support all their use cases. If not they would need to invest in tools like CDP and a team that can run multiple experiments using a combination of first party and alternative data .