Death by a thousand cuts: How to prepare for the demise of third-party cookies

This year marks a pivotal moment in digital marketing. With Google Chrome recently initiating the phase-out of third-party cookies, impacting 1 percent of its users to start, a major shift is underway.

This change is particularly significant given that three-quarters of marketers currently use third-party cookies to design and implement their marketing campaigns. This begs the question: how will companies navigate this transition effectively? Fortunately, there are promising solutions to redefine marketing in this new era. Businesses don’t have to suffer a death by a thousand cuts in terms of the slow but steady decline in the utility of cookies. But to avoid it, there are a few steps that IT teams should take to help their organizations prepare.

Seek First to Understand

The first step is to understand that the end of third-party cookies may significantly impact marketing and the IT team’s support of their initiatives. Without cookies, it will be much harder for marketers to link sales to specific campaigns and assess return on ad spend (ROAS) accurately.

Given this, you’ll want to understand how your marketing team is planning to pivot and what solutions and support they might need to be effective to maintain customer engagement and sales. Position yourself as a strategic advisor, one that is there to help them with new tools and know-how for this new, cookie-less challenge.

Evaluate Your Organization’s Needs

The first and most crucial step is a thorough needs assessment. This isn’t just about tech specs; it’s about aligning with the marketing team’s goals and processes.

Start by getting a clear picture of what data is being captured, where it lives and who’s using it. Think of it as taking an inventory of your organization’s data landscape, understanding everything from your everyday numbers to the big, complex data sets.

Next, set clear, achievable goals for your data management system. How will data inform key marketing and business decisions? With this in hand, draft a project plan that lays out the roadmap for your data management journey. It’s all about creating a system that not only fits with your company’s needs but also drives your business forward. Think of it as setting the stage for a data system that truly works for your organization.

Make First-Party Data a Priority

Sourced directly from customer interactions, first-party data is an untapped asset, offering an accurate snapshot of customers’ behaviors, preferences and interests, making it a powerhouse for personalized marketing and enhancing customer experiences.

Essentially, it’s a tool for both targeted interaction and strategic decision-making because your company can also use it for fine-tuning products and services as well.

And the best part? Since customers give their permission to use this data, it’s compliant with evolving privacy laws. That means building trust while you’re building business.

To highlight the value of first-party data, consider brands like Alaska Airlines, Brooks Running, DICK’s Sporting Goods, Endeavour Drinks, Planet Fitness, Seattle Sounders FC, Under Armour and Wyndham Hotels & Resorts. They’re effectively capturing this data to transform their customer interactions by using it to personalize their retail experiences, marketing strategies and customer service to understand customer preferences better.

Brooks Running, for instance, has built a 360-degree view of their running customers that is so effective that they’ve seen a 260 percent increase in click-through rates in paid search, a 150 percent average increase in paid social engagement metrics, and 128 percent increase in ROAS among other benefits.

Invest in the Right Tools

By using AI-powered software, such as a customer data platform (CDP), teams can swiftly build a unified customer data foundation, significantly enhancing the accuracy of identity resolution or the process of integrating data from multiple sources.

This process is streamlined through schema-free data ingestion, out-of-the-box (OOTB) cleaning rules, and AI/ML-driven identity resolution techniques, which do not require external data sharing.

These methods not only save time in normalizing data but also improve accuracy with configurable merge and unmerge rules and a stable, universal identifier across the tech stack.

IT teams can also accelerate the time-to-value to data in the CDP by offering role-based access and no-code tooling for business users. This approach allows for the rapid creation of new data attributes through SQL in the same environment used by marketers, effectively reducing data access bottlenecks.

Many also include the ability to safeguard customer data with encryption at all stages and hydrating real-time touchpoints with a comprehensive profile API.

Finally, you’ll want to track, audit and iterate data workflows across the platform to build confidence in the data, minimize downtime with automated monitoring and de-risk changes with a fully equipped sandbox environment. This approach ensures full version control, easy rollback options and compliance with consent management workflows.

As IT teams consider their priorities for the coming year, it makes sense to maintain a cutting-edge Master Data System (MDS) by integrating a customer data hub that renders all MarTech components composable. By having a dedicated infrastructure for resolving customer profiles, they can create a composable hub for unified profiles, which will mean fewer moving parts which translates to less overhead and maintenance burden. All of which will be important given the changes to deprecate cookies that Google is making.

Photo Credit: gcpics/Shutterstock

Derek Slager co-founded Amperity to create a tool that would give marketers and analysts access to accurate, consistent and comprehensive customer data. As CTO, he leads the company’s product, engineering, operations and information security teams to deliver on Amperity’s mission of helping people use data to serve customers. Prior to Amperity, Derek was on the founding team at Appature and held engineering leadership positions at various business and consumer-facing startups, focusing on large-scale distributed systems and security.