Cookies are still here: Keep calm and carry on with these 3 strategies

In January 2020, Google announced they were planning to deprecate third-party cookies in the Chrome web browser. While advertisers started planning, cookies received multiple stays of execution. This summer, Google called off the execution entirely.

With Google’s new plan to empower consumers to manage their cookies, marketers are wondering if all their planning and investment in a cookie-less future is still worth pursuing.

It is.

Cookies may not be going anywhere, but they will never be as valuable as they were in the past. Consumer knowledge and concern have increased, and legislators have followed suit with increased data privacy regulation that shows no signs of slowing.

Further complicating matters is the fact that media-channel fragmentation is only accelerating.

The result for brands is an exponential growth in the importance of measurement, as well as the first- and zero-party data it captures. To extract more value from measurement, brands and marketers alike should focus on three areas:

1. Measure brand love like you measure individual initiatives

When brands evaluate the success of a performance media campaign, they often rely on comprehensive data signals. Sure, the ultimate KPI — lead generation, sales, engagement, etc. — is the most important data point. But thorough performance reporting also considers the steps that consumers are likely to take before completing the ultimate conversion. How are they first interacting with a brand? Where are consumers dropping off? What are the most common pathways to conversion?

Yet when considering the performance of the overall brand — the most valuable and consistent commodity companies possess — the industry is much less stringent.

Surveys and social listening measurement strategies have been seen as the source of truth for brand sentiment for far too long when the reality is, people show their feelings through actions just as much as they do through words.

When looking at how people react to brands and trying to measure brand love, we can ask the same type of rigorous questions that we do for performance media.

How do consumers first develop an attraction to a brand? What prevents them from becoming passionate? What is the clearest pathway to more brand love?

Most importantly, this measurement philosophy provides brands with strategies to generate more brand love that truly impacts their bottom line.

2. Measure holistically across paid, owned and earned marketing efforts

While cookies may remain (at least until Google may decide to sharpen the axe once more), their continued depreciation makes establishing connectivity between paid, owned and earned data critical to building a more robust data intelligence.

Due to the nature of a brand’s marketing ecosystem, paid media performance is often looked at in a silo. Marketers are asking how their paid media performed when they should also be asking how that performance impacted owned and earned performance, and vice versa.

If you aren’t connecting all data sources across their common denominators (time series, audience, campaign, etc.), you’re ignoring the only viable way to measure marketing in the ever-changing landscape.

Strong marketing is consistent and holistic, and the measurement of that marketing must be as well.

It’s critical to build brandwide frameworks to drive equitable data collection across channels. A proper taxonomy, tracking infrastructure, and data architecture allow for synergy in performance results and insights in addition to companywide buy-in.

3. Trust aggregates predictive models; don’t rely on user-level data

Third-party cookies created the opportunity for user-level data, and to some degree that opportunity will persist. Robust audience ID graphs remain available, and marketers should continue to use them situationally while they retain value.

However, the long-term value of that approach is uncertain at best. Consumer and legislative trends are clearly pointing toward an approach that relies on an aggregate model.

Although personalized communication will always be critical, it is important to understand that decisions must leverage more aggregate data in an evolving marketplace. This can enhance data privacy for individuals while still ensuring brands have proper intelligence to drive effective planning.

The ability to observe every marketing interaction — the basis of multi-touch attribution models — was a tenuous proposition in the past and has only become more difficult over time. If they haven’t already, marketers should be shifting to a market mix modeling, which analyzes interactions of the marketing ecosystem through aggregate user data.

Proper measurement has never been more important, and never been more complicated. Cookies may not be dead, but they’ll never be the same after what the industry has put them through, and these three strategies can allow marketers to properly account for that.

This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.