When it comes to the reason why Google has chosen to deprecate third-party cookies to begin with, an increase in users’ demand for more control of their data is only the start.

Google must also comply with a long list of regulations surrounding privacy, the most notable being the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). These regulations ensure that there are certain standards for what constitutes valid consent when collecting personal data, as well as giving consumers more control over the personal information that businesses collect about them.

The phaseout of third-party cookies will support these legislations and ensure the success of the privacy-first era. From an overall perspective, the deprecation of third-party cookies will impact how campaigns are implemented and managed by brands and their partners. Previously, brands relied on third-party cookies to learn about a target audience and their online behaviors. Without this information, we can expect significant impacts on remarketing, frequency management, personalization, attribution and measurement. 

New ways to identify are on the horizon.

Third-party cookies facilitate cross-site audience identification, which essentially allows marketers to “follow” users across the web, collecting data about their interests and online behavior. Each of the tactics above rely on this form of cross-site audience identification, and without third-party cookies, marketers will be unable to access this information about their target market so easily. 

But that doesn’t mean marketers will no longer be able to conduct successful remarketing campaigns, control the amount of times a user views an ad, deliver highly personalized ads, or identify a user’s touchpoints along the customer journey—provided they prepare for the cookie-less future now and minimize its impacts on their digital media activities. 

Since the announcement of the deprecation of third-party cookies, Google has been working on a range of solutions to continue to show relevant content and ads. FLEDGE and Topics are two examples of current Privacy Sandbox solutions for showing relevant content to audiences.  

FLEDGE’s purpose is to serve remarketing and custom audience use cases, without using third-party cookies. It enables interest-group-based advertising by asking the browser to choose which ads users see based on the sites they’ve previously visited. To keep this data secure, the browser conducts an on-device action to select relevant ads. 

Topics is a proposal that enables interest-based advertising without tracking the sites a user visits. It provides topics that a user may currently be interested in, based on their recent browsing history. These topics can supplement contextual information to help select appropriate advertisements. 

However, trials for FLEDGE and Topics are still a work in progress and the solutions are continuously changing, so we must focus on what we can do now to be able to navigate in a world without third-party cookies. Don’t take a “wait-and-see” approach. Those who look to prepare now will increase their chances of success and advancement in the privacy-first era. Here are some strategies to help you on your way to post-cookie marketing success.

Prioritize and invest in a first-party data collection strategy.

To prepare for the deprecation of third-party cookies, marketers should focus on growing quality customer data that informs both strategy and tactics. Utilizing the data from customers who have shown interest in your brand is more reliable and powerful than buying and selling access to third-party data. 

First-party data gathered from your websites, apps, physical stores (including offline transaction data), or other places where customers interact with your business, are all examples of first-party data that you passively—but directly—collect from consumers. Earning this data relies on building a fair value exchange, so that consumer data is understood to contribute to a better experience. Customer trust is built on transparency, hence it's always important to explain how you’re going to collect and use the data in your cookie consent banner or consent management platform. When collecting data about your customers, you must also make certain that you are compliant with regulations such as the GDPR, ensuring you are getting valid consent when collecting personal data and not collecting personally identifiable information (PII). 

With first-party data, brands can evaluate local touch points and preferred paths, while customizing interactions for a superior customer experience. Now is an excellent time to look inward and begin to build the foundations of your data strategy—one that will power your marketing with clean, unified and actionable data. Collecting first-party data and linking it together allows you to have a persistent, cross-device recognition for a single view of your customer, and an overall understanding of your audience. Mondelēz, for example, understood that digital marketing is most effective when you know how to play to consumers’ personalized taste. After helping them along the road to clean data, we achieved a +70% global return on investment.

Focus on collecting information and data you have access to.

As a marketer, you have access to a plethora of data about your customers, whether it be purchase data, device information or email engagement. Having an identification-first approach to customer data will give you an upper-hand to targeting effectively without third-party cookies. With data from third-party cookies being cut off, the priority should lay with first and second-party data, audience partners such as walled gardens, prominent publishers and media platforms, retailers and strategic partners. 

After prioritizing your first-party data and collection strategy, you should focus on building experience with reputable, trustworthy second-party data partners. Second-party data is essentially someone else’s first party data that you purchase access to from partners like Google, Amazon, or large publishers. You should focus not only on historical data, but real-time behavioral data such as users’ devices, interactions with your website, their carts, purchase history, media consumption, as well as the categories and products they visited while browsing on your website. By leveraging second-party data from trustworthy partners, you will have more data transparency and access to more precise and niche audiences which are crucial after the deprecation of third-party cookies.

Conduct a measurement audit. 

Conducting a measurement audit will consist of analyzing everything you’re currently tracking and identifying if it is necessary to be measuring it. It will help you to identify potential gaps and develop a roadmap to achieve measurement excellence that drives business results in a world without third-party cookies. A measurement audit includes the evaluation of current measurement tools and systems, as well as the alignment of key goals to further develop the practice. When conducting the audit, you’ll want to identify the necessary data, reporting and analysis methodology to improve measuring marketing effectiveness going forward to help with planning and forecasting.

Key considerations when conducting the audit are to understand the need and whether you can drive more value from your analysis and analysis partners. You want to develop a robust framework that will be effective and efficient to leverage in your decision making. You also want to ensure the roadmap provides added value, and is adaptive and not difficult to implement. By conducting a measurement audit, you hope to identify opportunities for maximizing the value of your measurement, strengthening your analytic capabilities and performance, and understanding how to holistically link together different techniques for marketing effectiveness in a world without third-party cookies. 

Evaluate your ad tech stack and partnerships. 

It’s important for you to evaluate your ad tech stack and partnerships to identify technologies and practices at risk of deprecation in the near future. Having a strong, well-engineered ad tech stack will create seamless, relevant, and meaningful experiences for consumers and give you a deeper insight into those interactions. When evaluating your tech stack, you must analyze how much control you have over fee transparency, brand safety, streamlined operations, data ownership, targeting and ad serving. Your tech stack should also be able to enable current operations and be able to incorporate future ones. 

A partner risk assessment should be undertaken to evaluate how reliant partners are on non-compliant tactics, data and technology; what their new publisher and media partner offerings are, and opportunities beyond basic ad units. Those partners who rely on non-compliant tactics, data and technology should be making it clear what they are doing to prepare for the third-party cookie deprecation. Marketers should carefully consider their platform partners and ad tech stack and focus on those that can deliver results without third-party cookies.

Consider a dedicated testing budget. 

Marketers should allocate a dedicated testing budget for first-party data practices, audiences and strategies across thousands of variables. These areas should be tested and leveraged, becoming an integral part of the targeting strategy where successful. One way to do this is by  testing and targeting customer experiences to improve digital performance using optimization and personalization. You’ll want to design net new campaigns and tests running without cookies, leveraging experimental design. 

As the data agency of record for Molson-Coors, we’ve spent the last year helping the brand undergo a data transformation that ranges from data acquisition, data activation and optimization. With hands-on-keyboard talent and an in-house team, Molson-Coors is able to use that data to better understand creative and media performance, then make tweaks to drive long-term growth.

By testing audiences and strategies across thousands of variables to build detailed customer profiles and to increase ad performance, scaled experimentation is the best alternative to third-party cookies when it comes to personalized customer experiences, and the performance benefits have consistently been shown to outweigh the costs of investment. 

Don’t wait to get your digital house in order.

Third-party cookies have played an instrumental role in the immense growth in online advertising. Yet their often-intrusive nature is misaligned with current attitudes toward privacy and transparency—so moving beyond our reliance on cookies, while maybe painful in the short term, is a net positive in building stronger brand-consumer relationships. That said, we can expect more changes to data collection and privacy on both the platform and legislative level in the long term; the only thing that’s certain about privacy is that there will continue to be uncertainty. A privacy partner can help you navigate the always evolving world of data privacy with ease, and our Data Foundations offering is designed to help brands build data maturity to meet the demands of a new era, including increased privacy scrutiny.

In a broad sense, laying the foundation of a first-party data strategy will enable a clearer understanding of your audience. Meanwhile, new solutions on the horizon like Topics and FLEDGE will help brands mitigate risk and continue to deliver relevant content to their audiences. But marketers shouldn’t wait for tech giants to implement new solutions before they act. Those who build and enhance the core components and practices of a customer-centric marketing strategy will be better positioned for a world without third-party cookies and thrive in the privacy-first era.

We might speculate as to other reasons why the deadline has changed, but we can be confident that—whether from a privacy or commercial perspective—the proposed solutions haven’t met expectations. This is actually encouraging because we should expect a 2024 solution that doesn’t compromise on privacy or commercial performance.

But what does this mean for digital marketing? What changes? How do we position ourselves with this delay? There are things we know and things we don’t, but we can prepare for both. And one thing is for certain, the worst possible tactic is doing nothing. 

Here’s what we do know:

• Marketing on Google owned and operated properties (Search, YouTube and Maps) remains unchanged given its use of first party, rather than third party cookies.
• Audience (re)targeting, measurement and attribution will change, but we don’t know when or how.
• Life goes on within walled gardens, but with an increased focus on the value of first-party data across industry leaders like Google, Meta, Amazon, LinkedIn and TikTok.
• Elsewhere in the industry, there’s an expectation that the adoption of so-called “solutions”—clean rooms, ID resolution, SaaS marketing clouds, contextual—will slow down.

We agree that increased first-party data focus is the best move for marketers and agencies. This is a gift that cements the foundation of fully consented first-party data as part of the overall data strategy. 

The postponement is not an excuse to just keep doing digital marketing as we’ve always done it.  That’s a “fat and happy” symptom and a one-way ticket to extinction. Indeed, any lost opportunity to explore and learn new avenues is a waste.  That’s not to say we need to spend this extra time trying to maintain the status quo. Embracing regulatory and tech change as a driver rather than a business impediment is a competitive advantage.  

Here’s a recap of the Death of the 3P cookie timeline:

• 2018: DoubleClick ID files redacted
• 2019: Privacy Sandbox is announced
• 2020: Third-party cookie deprecation announced (targeting 2022) 
• January 2021: Google commits to Privacy Sandbox and Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC)
• March 2021: Google announces that it will not allow “alternate identifiers”
• June 2021: Google announces Chrome will stop supporting 3P cookies by end of 2023
• July 2022: Google Chrome has delayed 3P Cookie deprecation to 2024

How many more delays do we face? It doesn’t matter.  We’re already in a precarious situation that common sense says we don’t leave untouched.

One of the most recognizable personalities in the digital analytics industry, Avinash Kaushik, said, “Most browsers have allowed you to block third-party cookies since the dawn of the internet. A cluster of people (like me) have taken advantage of that option.” (Chrome is the last of the most popular browsers to have no restrictions on third-party data storage like cookies). “So your current third-party cookie tracking based audience and measurement at the minimum already has a signal quality degradation built in,” Kaushik goes on to say.

These are the unignorable signals of change. More than ever, be prepared.

As someone who has spent countless hours switching back and forth between the previous SA360 and the Google Ads’ UI, the new experience is a long time coming. The updates will offer SA360 advertisers an efficient workflow and stronger cross-engine compatibility, all within a single search management platform. Below is an in-depth look at what to look forward to as SA360 rolls out in 2022.

Greater Workflow Efficiencies

Google has shaped the new SA360 experience around achieving greater workflow efficiencies by implementing updates designed to minimize unnecessary repetitive tasks. One of the updates that I’m most excited about is the new and improved cross-platform support of the Google Ads Labels feature. Advertisers will no longer be required to recreate and reapply the same labels, as any labels linked to Google Ads will automatically become available in the new SA360 interface. This was one of the most requested features amongst my colleagues and clients, so it’s great that it’s finally here. The previous requirement of recreating and reapplying labels in SA360 through manual operations, such as bulk edits and excel uploads, will now be a thing of the past! 

There are more avenues to scale with centralization through enhanced cross-advertiser management. With the previous SA360, customizing reporting views or campaign management done at the “Advertiser” platform level has always operated individually. The new SA360 experience will address this by granting the ability to report and manage campaign activities across multiple Advertisers at once. Noticeable workflow improvements include the option to create custom columns (previously called formula columns) at the Manager (previously “Agency”) level, to execute bulk changes to multiple accounts simultaneously and to duplicate entities across engines or the Advertiser level with a new copy and paste function.

These new SA360 updates drive greater productivity for advertisers with many search engine accounts and agencies who would like to organize client reporting tasks simultaneously. 

A Familiar UI with Upgraded Navigation

Google has intentionally made the new SA360 look and feel more like the current Google Ads interface. Users that are already experienced in Google Ads will see immediate benefits and feel right at home with the new SA360. This is also useful for training and adoption, as any familiarity of the Google Ads UI navigation and workflow processes will translate over to the new SA360 (or vice versa) for one consistent experience and quicker adoption. It’s also an added bonus that Microsoft Ads has a very similar interface!

Vastly Improved Search Engine Support

The new SA360 and Google Ads now share core common technology powering the functionality and capabilities of both platforms, resulting in the ability to manage and process more data than ever, all while maintaining a fast user experience. This also means that previously unsupported features within SA360 will soon become available in the new version. Google has also confirmed the support for campaign types including Performance Max, Discovery Ads and Local Inventory Ads. 

To add to this, upgraded engine feature support such as extensions, audiences and creative formats for alternatives to Google (i.e. Microsoft RSA, DSA & smart shopping) will also be included in the upcoming updates. This improved support will allow advertisers to complete much more of their day-to-day workflow from within a single search marketing platform. Advertisers that are currently using SA360 to manage standard paid search campaigns and Google Ads to manage Performance Max or Discovery campaigns should be celebrating right now, as the management and reporting of all three campaign types can be done under the new SA360! This will also make it easier for dashboard reporting (i.e. third-party data or Data Studio) as users can include a single data source.

 

Updated Google Analytics Integration and Support for GA4

In the new SA360 experience, Google continues to develop SA360’s native integration with other GMP products, in particular with Google Analytics (GA4) properties. The new SA360-GA4 integration enables the import of GA4’s web and in-app event metrics into the SA360 reporting UI, allowing for additional measurement and optimization into how search activities are performing against web or in-app based events. Additionally, if Google Analytics Goals are your reporting and measurement source of truth, web or in-app-based GA4 Goals are available to use as a conversion source for performance automation and optimization—a handy alternative to Google Ads conversion tracking or floodlight tracking tags.

Bridging the Gap Between Platforms

When onboarding and training new clients in the previous SA360, one of the most frequently asked questions is: “Should we migrate our day-to-day workflow from Google Ads to SA360?”

I’ve always recommended that teams combine Google Ads campaign management workflows with SA360 performance optimization workflows (as opposed to using only one or the other) to get the most value out of both platforms. There will still be some instances that require switching between both. However, with the launch of the new experience, we’re seeing a big step with the new SA360 in the right direction in bridging the gap and enabling teams to use one interface for most tasks.



With the enterprise advantages of using a search management platform for engine consolidation, management, reporting and automation, we’re very excited for the streamlined and efficient workflows when transitioning search engine accounts’ daily tasks over to the new SA360 experience—and search marketers will be, too.

What will happen and when?

The free version of Universal Analytics will become read-only on July 1, 2023. The GA360 version of UA will become read-only on October 1, 2023.

For those on GA360, you will have at least six months after signing a Google Analytics 4 contract before your UA property is downgraded. 

What do you need to do?

They say the best time to plant a tree was 100 years ago…and the second-best time to plant a tree is now. Those who started the GA4 journey early will be in good shape, ready to have year-on-year comparison data. 

If you haven’t started your GA4 journey, start now. A realistic deadline to work towards is October 2022, which gives you 12 months of GA4 data for comparison purposes. Start with a Minimum Viable Product, which is a simple way to start swimming in GA4 waters. It takes 30 minutes to set up, involves just one tag, and yields a surprising amount of data. It also has no impact on GA360 billing and no impact on current data collection.    

When you’re ready, Media.monks is here to help support your migration. Media.Monks offers a wide array of analytics services and training so every one of our clients receives the consultation they need for a first class, end-to-end analytics roadmap and a seamless transition.

With Topics, Chrome determines several thematic interests, like “Fitness” or “Travel,” based on a user’s recent browsing history. Topics are calculated and stored entirely on a user’s device without communicating with Google’s servers. They are designed to be transparent and viewable by the user, as well as easily interpreted by potential advertisers via a JavaScript API. This makes Topics a future-proofed solution for simply and clearly providing user’s browsing interests for site owners and advertisers, without exposing detailed browsing history or cookie-based identifiers.

While Topics are aimed primarily at enabling advertisers, it could help with better onsite actions using tools like Google Optimize, Adobe Target, Optimizely, or other onsite testing and personalization platforms.

Brands Need to Look Beyond the Third-Party Cookie

Currently, most optimization or personalization tools cannot be used directly to customize onsite content based on interests. If they can, they are reliant on data management platforms (DMPs) and other brittle solutions that continue to require soon-to-be-deprecated third-party cookies. 

For example, Google Optimize cannot be used directly based on interest or affinity information inferred from third-party cookies. Instead, interest data provided by users who consented to third-party cookie tracking is currently available in Google Analytics for reporting and analysis purposes. 

Since this data is not available for use in audiences shared with Google Optimize, one is unable to target or personalize onsite experiences based on it. Alternatively, while Adobe Target may be able to access this data through API integrations with DMPs, it is also dependent on soon-to-be deprecated third-party cookies, making the data integration moot.

Chrome’s implementation of the Topics API meanwhile presents a ripe opportunity for personalization tools to leverage user interests, agnostic of the third-party ecosystem. In particular, a user’s interest topics will be stored entirely on the browser and accessible via API, meaning that they can be surfaced to a website or other API caller without reference to an opaque third-party cookie. 

This change enables accessibility of users’ Topics directly within the browser, rather than having to be processed on Google’s servers—meaning that a tool like Google Optimize will be able to query and read a user’s Topics in real time when they land on a website, leading to better onsite personalization in a first party context on the browser.

How Topics Can Enable Post-Cookie Targeting

Imagine a user visits our site www.ecommerce.com. As they land on the site, a query to the Topics API returns a relevant interest for that user is “Fitness.” We can surface that topic to an optimization/personalization platform (e.g. Optimize or Target) for targeting, resulting in the optimization platform changing the homepage banner to direct that user to our Fitness product category. 

In this way, Topics and a personalization engine could be used to:

• Update landing page copy and imagery to be more relevant
• Personalize a homepage banner to hero relevant product categories
• Feature content or articles more relevant to a user’s interests 
• Feed personalized recommendations to users

Pending the exact specifications of how Topics are eventually rolled out, even more advanced use cases may be made possible via storing and linking a user’s topics with a first-party identifier. A first party identifier could be cookie based for anonymous users (e.g. a cookie ID like Google’s client ID), or an identifier linked to a known/authenticated user (e.g. a customer ID, a hashed email address etc). In the above example, it may be possible for the user’s “Fitness” topic to be tracked against their first party identifier in an Analytics tool (e.g. stored alongside a customer ID in Google Analytics). 

Once associated with a user’s first-party Universally Unique ID (UUID), this topic could then be integrated with CRM data and used to power relevant marketing automation emails. The topic could also be used to generate more relevant retargeting audiences (e.g. via customer match) or be used to power dynamic creative. Personalization to that level now seems like a hygiene factor with a recent McKinsey report sharing how 71% of customers  expect at least a basic level of personalization. However, a fine line needs to be maintained in how data informs the creative process rather than dominates it. 

Prepare for Cookie Deprecation Now

Topics are still a very new proposal from Google that has been released in order to prompt discussion and feedback, meaning that the actual Topics API has not been thoroughly tested by partners and stakeholders yet. While we can speculate on use cases and possible applications to personalization, all of the above will have to be tested thoroughly as the Topics API is rolled out by Google. 

While we await more detail and further evolution of the Topics API proposal, businesses can partially execute on these use cases by deploying a platform to test and personalize on their website, as well as targeting affinity/interest audiences either via media targeting or profiles available via data management platforms. This would mean a proactive approach to adapt to the eventual deprecation of third-party cookies. Topics may represent a way forward for providing more relevant customer experiences (both onsite and advertising) in a more robust, privacy-centric way.

How is cost per click calculated?

The amount you spend for a digital click is broadly determined by four factors:

• Competition: more advertisers mean you are directly competing with more bidders in the auction.
• Quality Score: taking into account the quality of your ad and how relevant your ad message and landing page is to the search query.
• Bidding strategy: your maximum bid you are willing to spend per click or impression.
• Seasonality: when you advertise also has an impact on your cost per click. For example, if Black Friday is a popular time for competitors bidding, this will mean you are competing with more advertisers in the auction.

In Google Ads, you specify your maximum bid for keywords or phrases, then Google evaluates your ad to determine its quality score. Your quality score and maximum bid together make your Ad Rank. Google will use this Ad Rank to compare you to other advertisers. This is important so that only relevant and good quality ads are shown at the top of search results, a benefit to both the user and the advertiser.

Google then works backwards to answer the question: what is the bid the advertiser with the highest Ad Rank needs to win the auction? This is where the formula above comes from. The highest you will ever pay is your maximum bid, though advertisers can still win the auction with the lowest maximum bid by having the highest relevance.

How has cost per click changed over the years?

“Cost Inflation” is a term often sprouted by digital marketers as they worry about the increasing costs of running paid advertisements across platforms such as Google and Facebook. Whether that be pay-per-click search campaigns, image-based shopping ads or display campaigns on social media and popular blog sites, we are seeing a very similar trend: it is becoming more expensive to advertise. 

A study by Hochman Consultants looks at the average cost per clicks across 50 advertisers on the Google AdWords Network from 2005 to 2019, where the advertisers came from a range of industries. We can see that cost per click has been growing steadily over time, and in 14 years, the average cost per click is almost triple that of 2005. This study was conducted in the US, but we are seeing a similar trend across advertisers in the UK.

Like any competitive market, pricing is determined by supply and demand. When Google Ads first launched in 2000, there were 18 million searches per day worldwide. In 2019, there are around 5.6 billion searches a day worldwide—the equivalence of 63,000 searches every second. Not only is that 300x the search volume of when Google Ads first began; with growing capabilities of targeting, you are really able to whittle down which search queries you want to bid for based on location and for which demographic you want your ad to shown to. Also, the number of advertisers in digital marketing platforms are increasing, and spend for UK Paid Search media surpassed that of TV in 2015 becoming the most spent channel. 

How does cost per click differ across social media channels?

Facebook and Twitter are the cheapest to advertise in, with Instagram being double the cost. This is mainly due to a different ad format mix, where Instagram ads are more likely to be videos. LinkedIn is by far the most expensive to advertise in, as they offer a very niche audience of professionals, with filtering options to target job title, years of experience and company name for example.  

How can I lower my cost per click?

As mentioned earlier, cost per click factors in the quality of your ad in the Quality Score metric. In the example above, the advertiser willing to spend the least actually won the auction due to having a high-quality score. So how can you improve your quality score and therefore lower your cost per click?

• For Google Ads, ensure your ad is relevant to the keyword you are bidding for. If you are bidding for “hand sanitizer” but you really sell washing powder, you may need to rethink your keyword strategy.

• Make sure that your landing page is relevant for the ad. For example, a landing page with 100 different items to shop from including hand sanitizer wouldn’t work as well as a landing page that is only about hand sanitizer, because Google will deem the latter more relevant

• Optimize for click-through-rate. This is often the case with social media advertisement as well as Google Ads. Having a clear call-to-action and a good creative will help.

The final note is that historic performance of your account is taken into consideration when calculating cost per clicks, so take the time to make sure all ads are optimized as much as possible. With the info above, you should be well prepared to optimize toward success. Learn more about how we can help you now.