How Publishers Can Capitalize On Cookieless Advertising?

Soon, serving your audience ads will move from a heavy and perhaps lazy reliance on third-party cookies to a scenario where you have to build rewarding relationships with your audience to gather first-party data.

What is clear is that publishers must take measures now to wean their inventory off a cookie-rich diet and adopt a leaner, wiser, and healthier means of online advertising as their top resolution in 2024.

Entering a Sugar-less World: Death of Cookies

Google announced in 2020 that it would phase away third-party cookies in the Chrome browser, and it has finally happened. Google's decision to eliminate third-party cookies has made publishers think differently about cookieless advertising like targeting, monitoring user data & protecting data privacy. While Google has offered its Privacy Sandbox proposals in response to cookie deprecation, there are several challenges that publishers like you are trying to struggle through.

However, this new cookie-free world does not necessarily signal the end of online advertising as we know it. In fact, it’s far from ending as the digital audience continues to increase, and the US digital publishing industry is expected to become worth more than $11 billion by 2025, according to Statista.

This figure clearly indicates that publishers are all the more ready to design and test new ways to monetize their traffic. Publishers always had the cookie force behind them to serve relevant, user-centric ads. However, with their force being taken away, what else can they do to maximize the value of their inventory – that will turn into zero value for advertisers once the cookies are not around.

How will it impact you?

The cookie-free future will likely have a significant influence on programmatic advertising. Without third-party cookies acquired across the web, it will become challenging to identify users and their interests and preferences, resulting in decreased targeting precision and overall ad effectiveness for both you and advertisers. While in the fight for user privacy and ad personalization to users, privacy is winning with flying colors, finding a solution is becoming an increasingly daunting task – especially for small-scale publishers. Publishers require alternate techniques to provide tailored experiences that do not rely on third-party cookies or jeopardize consumer data security. 

To offer targeted advertising, you will need to change your methods by relying heavily on contextual targeting, employing first-party data acquisition, and other identifiers that favor user privacy.

“The faster publishers can build their first-party data, the better placed they’ll be to thrive into the future. Those who have a direct relationship with their audience can monetize their traffic more easily. For publishers who don’t have the established brands to sustain subscription models, the challenge will be acquiring this data without putting all their content behind logins and the browsing experience.”

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You should collaborate with identity providers who respect privacy to enhance first-party data collection. These solutions, including Unified ID 2.0 from The Trade Desk, deal with the primary issue that arises from an identification strategy that relies on first-party data.

Also, behavior targeting is the main topic of debate regarding data-driven advertising. However, contextual targeting is also growing more advanced, and it promises to help marketers reach relevant audiences without requiring them to gather audience data that is sensitive to privacy. 

Publishers can even combine contextual and behavioral intelligence to provide user-specific advertising based on interests, demographics, and current events.

But wait, there’s more! 

In the programmatic market, addressable audience creation offers a chance to stand out. The companies that provide extensive audience data with more transparency about how to reach those audiences and track exposure to them will emerge victorious in the next phase of open online advertising.

Ultimately, publishers can maximize the value of their targeted audiences by utilizing artificial intelligence. By using AI, publishers may create more nuanced profiles and, consequently, more targeted alternatives by identifying trends in user behavior and using less data overall. As a result, publishers can optimize the return on investment for their ads, increasing revenue and retention.

Solutions to Capitalize in a Cookiless Advertising Era

Statista’s study indicates that around 83% of marketers still use third-party cookies to launch their campaigns. And replacing these with a suitable alternative will be a significant task. Publishers must look for innovative alternatives for cookies to obtain insights to discover prospective consumers while safeguarding their digital brand and communicating with their target audience.

• Identity solutions can come to the rescue

In the cookieless world, identity solutions and alternative IDs enable marketers to optimize addressability. You can also offer the supply chain a solid consumer identifier for advertisers to track online consumer activity and provide tailored advertisements.

The problem for publishers here is to navigate the market's profusion of identification solutions and understand what they are, how they function, and how they could deliver particular advertising results.

• First-Party and Zero-Party Data Unification 

According to an eMarketer survey, publishers and marketers have different perspectives on vital cookie choices. Nearly half (47%) of publishers see using first-party data as a crucial approach for replacing cookies, but most advertisers disagree.

But how can it help?

First-party data refers to client information that businesses obtain directly from their sources, such as website interactions, purchases, or email subscriptions. Zero-party data is based on information that consumers provide, like survey responses, poll results, quizzes, or expressed preferences. 

Publishers that understand the value of first & zero-party data collecting and use conversational marketing tactics will improve their consumer data repositories, providing more targeted, engaged, and legitimate impressions to their demand partners.

• Digital fingerprinting on the rise

Digital fingerprinting extracts user habits and preferences from unique digital features such as browser kinds, screen resolutions, and installed typefaces. 

While this data might be critical for delivering relevant advertising in appropriate channels, its primary value is optimizing ad placements to assure exposure rather than personalizing ads to individual profiles. 

Publishers can leverage Customer data profiles or CDPs to collect and analyze data to provide the best advertising experiences for their users.

• Dare to diversify

Being small doesn't imply that you don't deliver value; it means that your audience is smaller. If you are a niche publication with a committed readership, consider implementing a subscription or freemium model. 

Is Contextual Advertising Making a Comeback?

Contextual targeting has been around for over two decades. However, the current contextual advertising, in particular, utilizes more sophisticated machine learning, allowing publishers and advertisers to be much more granular and smarter about targeting and matching the right ad with the content. 

“One of those “new ways” is a decidedly old way. Contextual advertising – which old-timers will remember as the way online advertising used to work – serves ads that are based on the content of the page, rather than on an individual user’s browsing history. So ads for wedding gowns appear next to content about weddings, rather than following a presumed bride-to-be around whichever websites she happens to visit.”

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While content around weddings was automatically thought to be an ideal spot to show an ad for wedding dresses, today's contextual advertising engines can learn a lot more about the content and make automated placement judgments based on various criteria. 

Many businesses are drawn to contextual advertising because of the possibility of directly tying their brand with high-quality content. 

A contextual targeting campaign by perfume company Carolina Herrera resulted in a 44% increase in brand memory due to its closeness to appropriate holiday gift tips. Publishers can utilize contextual and behavioral data to create advertising tailored to the user's interests, demographics, and current experiences.

When combined, these offers enable publishers to differentiate themselves in a market where competition for ad revenue will be fiercer owing to rising prices and increased competition from walled gardens.

Can Privacy Sandbox make a difference?

Google Privacy Sandbox will enable publishers to continue using behavioral targeting while also attempting to give anonymity to user data. But what does it entail?

• Topics API: This will allow you to preserve the privacy of your users while allowing their browsers to share information with you about their interests. It enables internet-based advertising without having to track user activity.

Imagine your browser figuring out broad topics you're interested in, like "sports" or "travel," based on the sites you visit. Then, advertisers can choose to show ads to people interested in those topics without actually knowing anything about you personally.

• Protected Audience API:  This proposal lets publishers create their own groups of readers interested in certain things, and advertisers can then choose to show ads to those groups without getting any individual names.

• Trust Token API: Publishers will utilize this API to distinguish between bot users and real people. This would allow for the identification of fraud without violating user privacy.

• Aggregated Reporting API: This API is intended to use reporting requirements, as its name implies. Without allowing for user cross-site tracking, performance-related data like impressions, views, reach, etc., would be combined into a single report.

• Privacy Budget: This feature will restrict the kinds of signals and user data websites may gather. 

Path Forward for Publishers

So, is Privacy Sandbox a good solution? Well, people are very apprehensive about it. As the solution is still in its testing phase, there is not much we can say.

Most marketers right now are of the opinion that it might give more power to Google than intended. It’s a matter of time. The additional delay in cookie deprecation further boosts the point of how serious the regulatory bodies are regarding user’s privacy and control. Given the situation, I think as a publisher, you must try everything that’s coming your way as an alternative to cookies. 

Maximizing the value of first-party data, creating addressable audiences, and enabling behavioral and contextual targeting will provide all publishers the best chance of beating the odds.