Understanding the Third-Party Pixel Apocalypse
Bridging the Tracking Gap with Creative Strategy
What’s at stake?
For years, the landscape of digital advertising has been one of ever-growing, seemingly limitless capabilities. Marketers have had powerful tools that have granted a degree of omnipotence, allowing them to target impossibly specific audiences, or analyze how website visitors index against the most obscure — and sometimes even humorous — behaviorally defined segments.
Leveraging third-party audience tracking, we’re able to provide our clients with extensive insight into the propensity of their site visitors to be actively in-market for hyper-specific items such as sliding glass doors, propane tank refills, and insect repellant. This information may not be of obvious use for, say, a car insurance company, but it could be incredibly valuable for a home improvement store that’s considering increasing its inventory of patio furniture.
Assuming these audience analytics were provided by a data vendor, we may also be able to target users in these segments across multiple advertising platforms and channels. We could compare, combine, or exclude them from our efforts. And we could develop our entire creative strategy around these learnings. Users in the “propane tank refills” group would get served ads with propane grill images. We may decide to include coupons for mosquito nets and flyswatters in the ads served to users in-market for “insect repellent.” We could even extend our efforts beyond the digital space and analyze in-store coupon redemptions using offline conversion tracking.
So, what’s the bad news?
While possible in theory, the harmoniously integrated campaign described above can only achieve its full potential if the associated tracking pixels and cookies are able to communicate unimpeded across platforms, websites, and analytics tools. As all digital marketers know, this delicate ballet of data cooperation is crucial to the success of any campaign which hopes to achieve mid- to low-funnel objectives.
While fragile, this ecosystem currently remains functionally intact. Marketers can still run campaigns in which audience data, site analytics, and conversion tracking all cooperate for the most part to provide actionable insights. Implementing this type of tracking may not always be the most linear process (Facebook often proves to be especially cumbersome), but experienced digital marketers have almost always found workarounds for these roadblocks.
Unfortunately, all signs point to a major shakeup on the horizon — one that may fundamentally unravel digital advertising as we have come to know it. The major players in the game (Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc.) have already implemented sweeping changes to their platforms’ targeting parameters. Facebook and Twitter have both removed third-party targeting capabilities, while Google and Apple have restricted third-party tracking cookies on Chrome and Safari.
While these changes have had a significant effect on marketers, the most monumental disruption has yet to come: Google’s announcement that their Chrome browser — which, at 59% market share, accounts for the majority of internet users — will block all third-party cookies by 2022.
The implications of this announcement are potentially staggering. Without third-party cookies, cross-site analytics becomes a thing of the past. Multitouch attribution and view-through conversion tracking will cease to function in an accurate and usable manner. Behavioral targeting will rely solely on the advertising platforms being utilized, and will vary greatly among them. Standardization will go out the window.
Sounds scary. What can we do to position our company in the best way possible?
While the uncertainty surrounding current and future cookie restrictions is worrisome, we believe that these obstacles will still provide ample room for creative digital strategy, and new opportunities for marketers to expand the scope of their media plans.
However, it’s important that any excitement is tempered with pragmatic and resourceful forethought. It would be foolish to assume that everything will turn out fine without taking action.
- The first step will be to take extensive inventory of your first-party data assets. What audience lists do you have available? Do they include data points such as email address, phone number, and ZIP code? Contingent upon agreeing to the ethical sourcing of customer information, it’s highly likely that marketing platforms will continue to allow first-party list matching for the foreseeable future. Owned data will become the most valuable tool on any digital marketer’s utility belt.
- Once these lists have been gathered, clean and sort them into segments that are valuable and relevant. Essentially, this means that marketers should ensure that they are creating multiple lists that can be used in a variety of ways. Have some of your customers opted in to a newsletter? Make sure you have a list with just these customers, or, at the very least, the ability to create a pivot table with these customers. Do you have criteria to denote customers who have purchased certain products or are repeat buyers? These could be extremely useful in remarketing efforts. The more data points that can be collected, the better positioned you’ll be in the future.
- While customer lists are incredibly valuable, they are difficult and time consuming to develop. That is why it’s equally crucial that marketers tag and track as many activities within their websites as possible. While first-party website user data may not provide names, email addresses, or ZIP codes, it does give marketers the ability to build and remarket to a vast array of audiences that have shown at least some interaction with their sites. That is to say, the days of remarketing to only website visitors and cart abandoners are through. Any marketers worth their title should explore building audiences based on site pages, scroll depth, button clicks, content interactions, video views, etc. A well-built website can be a gold mine for collecting actionable owned data, so be sure that yours is optimized and tagged to work hard for you.
- Finally, it’s very important that advertisers begin reevaluating the channels and platforms that they use. For instance, if your current campaigns rely heavily on behaviorally targeted programmatic display and social ads, you may want to consider branching out into platforms that will not be as significantly impacted once the data landscape changes. One such advertising platform that’s seen a huge increase in interest lately is Over-The-Top (OTT).
OTT looks to be excellently positioned for the future because it is a high-impact, high-funnel tactic that doesn’t rely extensively on user data. We expect to see CPMs increase in the OTT market as inventory becomes more competitive, coinciding with the rapid growth in advertiser interest. Now is the time to begin testing different types of OTT ad inventory and vendors, because the current parity within the Connected TV landscape is evaporating quickly. Advertisers who position themselves within this rapidly maturing marketplace early will benefit greatly from the learnings they can collect.
How should I feel about all of this?
While the uncertainty looming in the air may seem intimidating, the changes we’ve seen in recent years, and those which have yet to come, should represent an exciting challenge to dedicated digital marketers. With the right amount of forethought and creative problem solving, good marketing strategists should be well positioned for the path ahead, and able to reap the benefits of their calculated decision making for years to come.
