With the impending deprecation of third-party cookies, marketers find themselves at the crossroads of innovation and adaptation. As we bid farewell to this identifier, the emphasis shifts to forging deeper connections, understanding customer needs, and navigating the marketing landscape with data-driven precision. At Experian, we stand as your trusted partner, committed to guiding you through this transition. In this blog post, we’ll explore:
- How third-party cookie deprecation is impacting digital advertising
- Six alternatives to third-party cookies and where they fall short
- How Experian can help you navigate a cookieless world
Four ways third-party cookie deprecation is impacting digital advertising
Third-party cookie deprecation is causing significant challenges within the AdTech industry, manifesting in four key areas:
- Reach: Advertisers and demand-side platforms (DSPs) will face difficulties in reaching their target customers due to the absence of third-party cookies.
- Understanding audiences: Advertisers will find it challenging to understand the demographics and behaviors of their customer base without third-party cookies. Similarly, publishers are struggling to identify their audiences accurately, resulting in less addressable and appealing inventory.
- Measurement: Measurement providers may encounter obstacles in accurately assessing the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Additionally, DSPs are finding it hard to measure the impact of their ads without the assistance of third-party cookies.
- Matching: Data providers may experience challenges in matching users with the appropriate audience segments, leading to difficulties in delivering targeted advertising.
Six alternatives to third-party cookies
As the deadline approaches for Google’s removal of third-party cookies from Chrome by the end of 2024, marketers are scrambling to discover alternative methods for delivering effective advertising. Fortunately, various alternatives are emerging. However, the abundance of options can create confusion rather than clarity. Which alternatives are worth considering? Here are six compelling alternatives to third-party cookies:
1. First-party data
Acquiring consented first-party data directly from users is becoming increasingly vital as it can lay the groundwork for more precise targeting.
2. Universal IDs
Alternative identifiers like The Trade Desk’s UID2 and ID5’s Universal ID are becoming increasingly important, offering the ability to maintain a comprehensive consumer view across channels and platforms, leading to enhanced personalization and addressability across various channels, even in cookieless environments.
3. Identity graphs
As browser-based IDs shift and digital signals decline, the need for an identity graph grows, with companies adopting a “graph-of-graph” strategy by combining their own robust first-party data with licensed identity graphs, as highlighted in recent announcements by industry giants such as Disney, VideoAmp, and Magnite.
4. Contextual targeting
Contextual targeting aligns publisher content with relevant ads, ensuring ad delivery based on content rather than individual identifiers. This privacy-respecting approach is less dependent on third-party cookies, providing effective audience activation.
5. Data collaboration
In a cookieless world, it becomes more difficult for companies to “communicate” with one another. We expect to see more pick up of data collaboration in the market, using addressable IDs and identity resolution to power connectivity between partners and their data sets.
6. Google Privacy Sandbox
The primary goal of Google’s Privacy Sandbox is to continue to deliver valuable consumer information that yields relevant marketing and media strategies, while protecting a user’s privacy.
How these alternatives to cookies fall short
While it’s promising to see numerous alternatives to cookies emerging, it’s essential to recognize that each alternative has its limitations and is not a perfect one-to-one replacement for third-party cookies. Let’s review the shortcomings of these alternatives, and then we’ll walk through how Experian can help you navigate these alternatives to cookies.
1. First-party data
First-party data, which is data directly collected from your users with their consent, is highly valuable. However, you will likely face limitations in terms of the number of consumers in your database, the identifiers linking them, and the insights into their demographics and behaviors. To overcome these limitations, it’s essential to expand both the quantity and quality of your first-party data.
2. Universal IDs
Universal identifiers are valuable for tracking users across different devices and websites. However, no single universal identifier has enough reach to fully replace third-party cookies. Universal IDs are most effective in terms of scaling, when they are combined with other universal identifiers or alternative addressable identifiers.
3. Identity graph
Identity graphs excel at connecting digital audiences. However, establishing an identity graph from scratch is a significant accomplishment, demanding expertise, financial resources, and more.
4. Contextual targeting
Contextual targeting and advertising aim to place your ads next to relevant content. However, there’s a risk that your ads might appear alongside misaligned content, reaching audiences who are uninterested or unintended.
5. Data collaboration
Data collaboration is beneficial for enhancing your consumer data and informing your strategies. However, it can introduce potential data security risks, if not done in the right framework, and may lead to subpar matching results due to issues like data hygiene or discrepancies in identifiers.
6. Google Privacy Sandbox
Google’s Privacy Sandbox aims to balance effective advertising with consumer privacy and data security. However, it lacks transparency and has yet to prove its effectiveness, raising concerns about whether it meets industry standards.
How Experian can help you navigate a cookieless world
As an industry innovator and leader in data and identity, we’ve developed solutions to address the challenges posed by the shift away from third-party cookies. Our products are designed to adapt to these changes and ensure your success. We’ve anticipated industry shifts and proactively prepared our offerings to support you through this transition. Below we outline how our products are ready to support you through the transition away from third-party cookies.
Graph
The Experian Graph facilitates connectivity without relying on cookies. Our Graph helps ensure connectivity by supporting a variety of addressable identifiers, not limited to but including universal IDs, like Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) and ID5’s universal ID. Whether you have first-party data or not, our Graph can be used to expand the reach of your first-party data or provide you with access to the full scope of our Graph’s 126 million households and 250 million individuals.
Activity Feed
Supported by our Graph, Activity Feed can help you deliver digital connectivity and resolution in a cookieless environment. Activity Feed can resolve disparate activity to a single, consumer profile. It can expand the quantity of addressable identifiers associated with your first-party consumers. Additionally, Activity Feed, by joining disparate activity and identifiers, provides clearer insights, more addressable targets, and more holistic measurement.
Our Marketing Attributes and Audiences
In a cookieless environment, our Marketing Attributes and Audiences provide valuable information and insights about who your consumers are, like their demographics, shopping patterns, and more, to facilitate more informed decision-making. You can use our Marketing Attributes and Audiences to enrich your first-party data, giving you crucial insights into your customers so you can make informed, strategic decisions. They can be matched to universal identifiers, expanding their utility. Additionally, our Marketing Attributes and Audiences are sourced from non-cookie dependent offline and digital sources, ensuring they are unimpacted by third-party cookie deprecation.
Collaboration
While third-party cookies have primarily served to connect data in the industry, many companies are turning to data collaboration in lieu of having third-party cookies. In doing so, they can connect data with key partners, which they can use to make better media decisions.
Experian Collaboration helps make data collaborations better, powering higher match rates by using the various identifiers supported in our offline and digital graphs. Through our current support of collaboration in three environments, within Experian, through crosswalks, and in clean rooms, such as AWS, InfoSum, and Snowflake, we ensure that you only share the data you intend to share, while the sensitive information remains secure. This way, your partner and you can focus on how to use the data to benefit you and not on anything else.
Get started with alternatives to third-party cookies today
While many view the deprecation of third-party cookies as disruptive, we see it as an opportunity for the industry to embrace a new era of advertising while prioritizing consumer privacy. Achieving this balance is crucial, and Experian’s solutions are here to help you navigate it effectively. As the AdTech industry gravitates toward a few tactics to effectively advertise in the cookieless future, Experian is here to understand your core needs and recommend products that will help.
In a rapidly evolving marketing landscape, Experian stands as your trusted partner, offering expertise in data-driven and identity solutions. Connect with our team to seamlessly transition into these alternatives to third-party cookies, ensuring your marketing strategies remain effective, privacy-compliant, and focused on meaningful connections.
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On April 22nd, Americans and many of their terrestrial counterparts in countries around the world will celebrate Earth Day, a tradition that was started in the United States by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970. Much has changed on the planet since the first Earth Day, and even in recent years attitudes continue to evolve when it comes to our outlook towards the environment. In 2007, Experian Simmons created the GreenAware consumer segmentation, which classified respondents to the Simmons National Consumer Study between 2005 until 2007 into one of four mutually exclusive segments based on their consumer behaviors and attitudes toward the environment. Since then, Experian Simmons has continuously classified all adult respondents into the GreenAware segments providing our clients with valuable insights into the evolution of the environmental movement. The four GreenAware segments are: Behavioral Greens: This group of people thinks and acts green. They have negative attitudes towards products that pollute and incorporate green practices into their lives on a regular basis. Think Greens: This group of consumers think green, but don’t always act green. Potential Greens: This group neither behaves, nor thinks along particularly environmentally conscious lines and remains on the fence about key green issues. True Browns: They are not environmentally conscious, and may in fact have negative attitudes about environmental issues. Since 2005, we have observed a nearly constant increase in the percent of U.S. adults who are classified as Behavioral Greens, the “greenest” segment of the four. Today, 33% of adults are Behavioral Greens, up from 27% who were classified as such in 2005. Meantime, Think Greens have maintained an almost perfectly constant 21% share of the population. The size of the True Browns segment has also remained constant at between 14% and 15% of the total adult population. The Potential Green segment, however, has steadily declined in market share from 39% in 2005 to 31% today. La Vida Verde Hispanic Americans have traditionally been ahead of the curve when it comes to green thoughts and deeds and they’re only getting greener with time. Today, 39% of Hispanic adults are Behavioral Greens, up from 33% in 2007. Just 32% of non-Hispanic adults are Behavioral Greens today, up from 29% who fell into the greenest segment in 2007. Interestingly, among the True Browns segment there are virtually no Hispanics to be found, and, in fact, while the True Brown population is actually growing among non-Hispanics, Hispanics are increasingly moving to greener segments. Specifically, just 1.3% of Hispanics are True Browns today, down from 8% who registered as such in 2007. By comparison, 17% of non-Hispanics are True Browns today, up from 14% in 2007. Green Today, Greener Tomorrow? The illustration below shows the alignment of America’s largest metropolitan areas with the four GreenAware segments today and in 2007. We see that residents of the San Francisco-, New York- and Miami-areas are the most likely to be in alignment with the Behavioral Green mindset today. Denizens of Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston tend to fit more closely with the Think Green set that has green attitudes and intentions, but not always the actions to back it up. But things are changing. In fact, since 2007, we’ve seen that as local minds change, some cities become aligned with a different, often greener, segment. Let’s look at Chicago, for instance. In 2007, Chicagoans’ environmental outlook was more reflective of a mix of Potential Greens and True Browns. Since then, local attitudes have changed so much that Chicago-area residents are now more aligned with Think Greens and Behavioral Greens. Likewise, Cleveland, which was clearly a True Brown town in 2007, now falls in step with the Potential Green segment. In five years’ time, who knows? Cleveland could be America’s next green leader. Not brown now towns Looking at markets large and small with the biggest drop in concentration of True Browns, we see that attitudes in inland markets located in Gulf States have become disproportionately less brown since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. In fact, seven of the ten Designated Market Areas (DMA) that saw the biggest decline in the percentage of their population classified as True Browns between 2007 and 2011 are inland markets in states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. While the oil didn’t directly reach these markets, the attitude change did spread: For example, 3.2% of adults residing in the Columbus-Tupelo-West Point, Mississippi DMA today are classified as True Browns, down from 19.3% who were categorized as such in 2007. In Macon, Georgia, while not a Gulf State, a more impressive shift took place. In 2007, the Macon, Georgia DMA had the fourth highest percentage of its population classified as True Browns (20.1%) out of 209 DMAs. Today, only 5.8% of area residents are True Browns, which makes it the market with the 10th lowest concentrations of True Browns in the nation. Macon still has one of the lowest shares of residents who are Behavioral Greens in the nation, but what a difference a few years makes. While the towns directly in the path of the oil spill are not among those with the biggest relative decline in True Browns, area residents’ attitudes did take on a greener hue since the spill. Today, 8.4% of residents in Panama City are True Browns down from 17.3% in 2007. Likewise, only 9.8% of adults in both the Mobile-Pensacola and Biloxi Gulfport DMAs are True Browns down from 17.3% and 19.0%, respectively, who fell into the least green segment prior to the spill. Learn more about Experian Simmons consumer segmentation offerings
As sure as the sun rises and sets, Tax Day comes around every year, whether it falls on April 15th or a day or two thereafter. As part of the Simmons National Consumer Study, Experian Simmons collects information on the various ways Americans file their taxes. In the following post, we will explore a few tax trends in the Land of the Free as well as some deductions available to many. Software for the Hard Stuff Long gone are the days of preparing our taxes the old-fashioned way using pen and paper (and hopefully a calculator). Last year, just 8.7% of U.S. tax filers prepared their taxes manually, down from 16.4% of filers who prepared their taxes this way in 2006. Software (including both online and offline versions, such as Turbo Tax or H&R Block At Home) have risen to replace their graphite-powered ancestors. In 2005, 21.5% of tax filers said they used software to prepare their taxes. Specifically, 6.8% used offline software and another 14.7% used online software. Today, 21.5% of filers use online tax software and 7.4% use offline software, bringing the total share of software preparers to 28.9%. But tax software isn’t just replacing at-home pencil pushers. The share of filers using a CPA, a private accountant or a notary public to prepare their taxes has also declined slightly in recent years as has the share of filers that use a professional on-site service, like H&R Block of Jackson Hewitt. In 2011, 30.8% of filers had their taxes prepared by a CPA, private accountant or notary, down from 32.9% who employed this type of professional in 2006. Likewise, 17.7% of last year’s filers used a professional on-site service to prepare their taxes, compared with 19% who used such a service in 2006. Filing Trends of Business Owners Much attention in Washington has been paid to small business owners, especially when the topic of tax policy is concerned. Rest assured, we’re not going to explore the political implications of proposed tax code changes on business owners, but we will examine the way these Americans prepare their personal taxes. A business owner’s tax prep work depends a lot on how many employees they have working for them. Those who own very small companies with between 2 and 9 employees, including the owner, are the most likely to have a CPA, private accountant or notary prepare their taxes. In fact, 65% of these small business owners do their taxes this way, compared with 52% of those who own companies with between 10 and 99 employees. Interestingly, only 35% of tax filers who own companies with 100 employees or more use a CPA, a private accountant or a notary to prepare their taxes, a rate equal to that of the national average. Larger business owners are actually more likely than average to have their taxes done by an on-site professional. While few business owners do their taxed by hand, the self-employed who have no employees are actually among the few that still do their taxes the old-fashioned way. In fact, 11% of business owners who list only themselves as employees say they did their taxes manually last year, a rate 30% above than the U.S. average. Most of those who don’t to their taxes themselves have them done by a CPA, a private accountant or a notary. Fifty-two percent of the self-employed with no other employees chose this method to prepare their taxes last year, which is a rate 45% higher than the average filer. Deduction Time Deductions are a common way for reducing one’s tax liability. Here we’ll explore how many Americans could benefit from several common deductions allowed by the Internal Revenue Service. For more information about consumer trends, visit www.experian.com/simmons.
Yesterday, Facebook announced the acquisition of Instagram, a popular photo sharing network with over 30 million users, for $1 billion. Visits to the Instagram website have steadily increased over the past 24 weeks and reached 3.8 million last week, up from 68,800 visits for the week ending October 22, 2012. While the majority of activity takes place within the Instagram application, the website provides links to the Apple App Store and Google Play as well as some account management tools, so the growth marks increased consumer interest. The audience for Instagram is relatively young, with over half of the visitors to the Instagram website are under the age of 35. This is an interesting contrast to the visitors of Facebook’s website, which reflects a more mainstream audience with a higher share of older users. These differences can certainly offer opportunities to promote and grow usage of each of the networks across age groups. Many users of Instagram share their photos across a number of social networks since within the Instagram application, you can link to your share photos with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous (recently acquired by Twitter) and Foursquare accounts. As a result of this integration and heavy use of social networks in general, social networks refer the majority of traffic to the Instagram website. Last week, 25% of the traffic to Instagram from social networks was from new visitors, most likely interested in learning more about Instagram after seeing photos within the feeds of their friends. Last week, there was considerable excitement around the launch of Instagram app for Android phones, which became available on Google’s recently relaunched digital media store, Google Play. The app reached over 1 million downloads on the first day of availability. Visits to the Instagram website increased 59% over the previous week and Google Play ranked 6th among the downstream websites visited immediately after the Instagram website. Please note this data does not include mobile traffic.