Keep Your Cookies from Crumbling

Digital marketers, and their anxious non-digital counterparts (like you), will benefit from taking action now instead of waiting for the "cookie" to crumble.

Business and website owners (and their hired nerds) are being pushed, toward a model where targeting quality correlates with the depth of your direct customer relationship rather than your ability to passively track anonymous users.

Brands with strong owned audiences, good email programs, and affirmatively-consented first-party data are going to have durable targeting capabilities. Brands that built entirely on third-party behavioral tracking are going to struggle both legally and commercially.

Maintain your tracking capabilities effectively in these ways to keep your business growing:

• Activate affirmatively-consented cookie policies (sorry about the data loss 🫠 )

• Stop using 3rd-party tags. Use Google Tag Manager's server-side container, and Meta's Conversions API (CAPI)

• Build great first-party data using stuff like email engagement, logged-in site behavior, purchase history, and then...

• Upload customer lists for matching using Meta's Custom Audiences or Google Customer Match

• Continue with your contextual targeting - including testing (or re-testing) 3rd party media buys

• Set up clean rooms and data collaboration using Google Ads Data Hub, Meta's Advanced Analytics, LiveRamp, etc.

• Platform native retargeting doesn’t rely on tagging, so just keep on doing what you're doing there

If your nerds aren't thinking about this, definitely bring it to their attention.

If you haven’t got any nerds, it’s definitely time to get growing.