Let’s Face it, Third-Party Cookies Were Always Problematic — Now We Need a Data Detox

Getting caught up in cookie chaos isn’t doing retail brands any good. Marketers distracted by the directional shifts of deprecation progress — including Google’s latest delay — are once again forgetting what this change is about.

Data signal loss is arguably a problem that the marketing space brought on itself. Created to help early web users exchange information across sites and keep items in online shopping carts, cookies have long stopped being useful to consumers. Now, they enable online tracking that’s so persistent it has fueled mass loss of consumer trust as well as tightened regulation.

Bringing this reality to the forefront is essential to refocus on what matters: retiring standard trackers and winning back consumer confidence with a responsible approach to delivering data-driven experiences.

Stick or Twist: The Deprecation Dilemma

Google’s recently moved deadline was the best timed so far. Its end to cookie support was always likely to trigger cautious advertising investment. Therefore, pulling the plug in an environment where global economic fluctuations were already affecting ad spend might have softened the blow for many, especially retail brands.

The extended goalpost presents a different scenario. Retail marketers can either stick or twist: waiting for better post-recovery market conditions and alternative solutions in 2025 or adjusting data practices to fuel cookie-free ads immediately.

Twisting is obviously the wise option for building a healthier ecosystem. Those taking the proactive route, however, must still carefully consider what goes into their detox diet.

An Evenly Balanced Menu

Among the extensive array of cookie-free approaches on offer, three key options stand out as the optimal blend for sustainable success:

• Maximizing owned assets: The value of first- and zero-party data for post-cookie ad targeting can’t be overstated. With direct consumer access, retail marketers are ideally placed to gain consent and create rich stores of both: gathering insight directly from consumers and collating useful information about on-site or on-platform behaviors — including interactions, purchases and product page visits.
• Embracing versatile IDs: As the closest equivalent to third-party cookies, alternative IDs are often hailed as vital for maintaining user-level precision and protecting data privacy. These identifiers allow retailers to keep track of customers as they move across the web and serve consistently targeted ads in two ways — using anonymized deterministic insights such as email addresses or leveraging nonpersonal data signals like device type to generate probabilistic approximate IDs.
• Applying holistic analysis: Marketing mix modeling (MMM) is gaining revived industry attention as an accurate method of mapping advertising impact without relying on personal data. Analyzing a broad range of variables — from historic sales to audience demographics and economic shifts — this tried-and-tested approach gives marketers a cookie-less overview of how their efforts link to core business performance measures, such as bottom-line revenue.

Flexible technology will be integral to underpinning all of these adaptations. At a foundational level, retail marketers will need data management setups capable of efficiently collating, syncing and sorting information from varied sources — including their e-commerce sites and other channels — as well as facilitating refined evaluation that enables them to uncover (and harness) granular behavioral patterns and preferences.

Assessment solutions powered by advanced generative artificial intelligence are also set to form a major part of that, particularly the emerging wave of self-service analytics. Making it easier for marketers to get fast answers to plainly worded questions and transform datasets in whichever way they need, advanced systems bring greater agility that will prove critical in ensuring optimal use of available data signals.

Since legislators first spotlighted the impact of uncontrolled data collection on user privacy, marketers have known that cookie-based advertising needed to evolve. Although Google’s deferral may have plunged the industry into fresh doubt about how, and when, to end heavy dependence, smart retail brands know that the time for a full detox is well overdue.

Mitesh Lakhani is senior director of solutions consulting at Adverity, a fully integrated data platform for businesses to easily automate the connectivity, transformation, and governance of data at scale.