Cutting the Cookie Habit: Get Lean with Modern User Tracking and Build Customer Trust

I'm trying to cut sugar to lose weight. While I try not to grab sweet food items like a cookie, they're hard to resist. It's quite a similar situation to my digital marketing efforts. Now, we need to go cookieless to remain compliant with data privacy norms. It's time for marketers to cut the sugar, practice restraint when capturing data, and get lean on tracking. Tech companies like Apple and Google are making sure that happens.

Marketers don't have a problem complying with data privacy norms. It's just that they now have to figure out cookieless attribution. In order to succeed, they have to align with new performance measurement methods and make sense of the data. So let's talk about what going cookieless means for marketers. With lean ways of tracking users and measuring performance, what's next?

A quick context behind factors that led to cookies being declared 'unhealthy’

The cookie-based tracking of users for online ads has been around for decades. Cookie technology has been a cornerstone of digital marketing, benefiting both marketers and users. How did cookies get classified as 'unhealthy'? What events and factors led to it?

In the early 2000s, third-party cookies became the dominant tool for online advertising, letting advertisers track users across websites. In the decade after, public awareness about online privacy grew, with data collection and targeted advertising becoming mainstream. It was followed by the FTC releasing a report highlighting concerns about online tracking and data collection. There was a call for a "do-not-track" system that would keep people from being tracked. The first browser to implement the feature was Mozilla Firefox, followed by Internet Explorer 9, Safari, Opera, and Google Chrome.

The EU introduced GDPR in the mid-2010s, giving individuals more control over their data. Eventually Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) and Google announced Privacy Sandbox to further restrict third-party cookies. Here we are, in the 2020s, when major browsers like Chrome are planning to phase out third-party cookies completely.

Challenges with cookie-based tracking which solidified their 'unhealthy' tag

A cookie is a small text file that collects information about your browsing habits. Cookies can be necessary for running a site, or they can be used just for analytics, promotion, or other digital marketing activities. The problem with cookie-based tracking was that it tracked user activity even when the user closed the website that placed the cookie on the device.

In addition to this challenge, users could delete cookies from their browsers or block tracking cookies altogether. With various tech devices out there, including laptops, desktops, smartphones, and tablets, it became difficult to track users across all of them. There's usually a short life span for cookies, ranging from a few days to a few months. After a cookie expired, it was harder to get accurate data and build a complete profile of the website visitors. Cookie-based tracking often led to fragmentation in data collected and the resultant user profile. Combined with the emergence of data privacy regulations, it was labelled an 'unhealthy' marketing practice.

Giving up on cookies - A new approach to user tracking and attribution

Few weeks back, I talked about cookieless user tracking where users and marketers can come up with a recipe for a braver world of marketing where everyone wins. I'll put a link in the description. I talked about how cookies helped marketers know their customers better and use the data to deliver better online experiences.

Marketers still have to build customer personas to offer personalized experiences, and customers want to be wowed before they buy. Now, all this has to happen without violating the customer's privacy. The cookieless tracking can help, but how does the cookieless attribution work? Cookieless attribution tracks user interactions and secures conversions with innovative technologies and methodologies. Device fingerprinting and deterministic attribution are two common approaches.

Through device fingerprinting, a website can identify every visitor based on the information their browsers pass along. The captured data can include the screen size & resolution of the user's device; fonts used on the device; hardware information like CPU type, graphics card type, and memory; details about the device's network configuration, ISP, and proxy settings; and browser type and OS. You can build visitor profiles using fingerprinting solutions by taking tens of parameters into account without collecting restricted info. Combining these details makes a fingerprint highly unique, with a low chance of running into two identical ones.

Through deterministic attribution, user actions are directly linked to specific marketing touchpoints using known identifiers, like login information or customer IDs. Directly connecting actions to a user's corresponding touchpoints without cookies makes attribution much more reliable. A deterministic cookieless attribution approach aligns with users' preferences while providing marketers with a clear and precise picture of how their campaigns work.

Removing cookies from the marketers' plate has benefits…

While many marketers have heard about cookieless attribution, they don't know how it can benefit their marketing efforts. Cookieless attribution can help you track things more consistently across devices. There are ways to block cookie tracking on certain websites or turn it off altogether, but cookieless attribution uses different methods to collect data more holistically and privately.

It can also cut down on wasteful ad spending. You can spend your money on what works with the right audience with more refined targeting. You'll also provide a better user experience with more relevant content, which leads to more conversions and higher ROI.

Finally, adopting a privacy-focused approach to attribution will boost your brand's reputation as a forward-thinking organization and customer trust.

…but it has added a lot more to it!

In the end, removing cookies from marketers' recipes for targeting, tracking, and performance measurement has added a lot more to their plates. Getting cookieless attribution up and running can be a bit tricky on the technical side since it's so new. You might need to do some serious tweaking to your tracking setup, which takes time and resources.

The data isn't as accurate as cookie-based methods, which makes it difficult to track user interactions and ensure data is collected at the right touchpoint. There's also no standardized method across the industry, so collecting data consistently across platforms is hard. In addition, marketers have to learn new tools, technologies, and methods as they use them. Last but not least, getting internal buy-in for new attribution models is tough. New advertising models can be scary to some business owners, since they require a leap of faith.

A healthy approach isn't easy, but will go a long way…

For most marketers, this might sound like going on empty stomach most of the day. That's a huge departure from comfort food. It is about getting used to chewing a lot more and consuming a salad made up of disparate data points. Even if it gives you privacy-first insights into user behavior.

The first step to something that might be a lot to chew is to define a clear use case with expected outcomes. It's helpful to learn tools like GA4 from the perspective of data collection specific to the use case. There's no standardized approach, so you've got to take an exploratory approach. You'll have to do a lot of A/B testing to figure this out.

It might also require optimizing data collection processes to prioritize first-party data for targeting and attribution. There's a chance your in-house capabilities are limited or non-existent. You could shorten the learning curve and adoption by getting help from specialized agencies.

At the end of the day, marketers and business leaders have to accept that this approach to targeting customers without compromising their privacy leads to lean user tracking and building customer trust. In other words, dropping cookies from the marketing plate might have made it even more complex. But cutting down on all that sugar promises a marketing future that can bring compliant user trackability and attribution; developing customized recipes for attribution that align with your business priorities; continuing to deliver targeted and personalized experiences to customers; leaner ads; and performance measurement that correlates to organization objectives.