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Third-party cookies are tiny pieces of data that are stored on a user's computer when they visit a website. These cookies can be used to track users' browsing activity across multiple websites and data companies. Historically, data companies aggregated this information and organized this user data into segments. This form of open (and privacy concerning) data collaboration allows advertisers to target users with more relevant ads, frequency caps, personalization and decent campaign tracking performance.
However, as we all know, third-party cookies are under fire due to privacy concerns. As a result most browsers – including now Google Chrome - have removed (or have announced removing) support for third-party cookies.
The loss of the cookie will certainly make it much harder for advertisers to track users and target them with ads. This will lead to a decline in the revenue that online publishers generate from advertising and very likely lead to many budgets moving to the walled gardens where people and budgets are tracked with much more fidelity than the open web. This budget movement is terrible news for the independent ecosystem that has been fighting long and hard to remain relevant in an age of “bigger is better and easier”.
To capture the value of their loyal audiences without the 3rd party cookie and to protect their existing media sales revenue streams, publishers need to collect and own their own data and identity to remain in control. This means collecting data directly from users, such as their email addresses, user consent, interests, and demographics.
As this data is created, publishers can enrich their data with multiple other universal identifiers to maximize the appeal of their audiences across various demand sources such as SSPs, DSPs and agencies. This mapping of the publisher’s first-party data to other universal identifiers is one part of an identity graph.
This identity graph (or ID graph), allows the publisher to associate multiple identity keys to match with partners, while reducing the leakage of data (via the 3rd party cookie). Publishers can also enrich the identity data with attributes (such as demographic or other information) to build a complete picture of the publisher’s loyal users. Its worth noting, that while building this identity graph asset, it is not recommended to be limited to a single universal ID vendor – this is both an inadequate identity spine and a way to become over reliant on a vendor that could change pricing, business models or go bankrupt.
Once armed with their own identity and data, data-driven publishers can then use this ID and contextual data to create their own audience segments – based on either onsite signals from their user journeys or from the contextual analysis of the content they consume – which can be offered to advertisers to target upon. By leveraging their first-party data (versus the non-private 3rd party mechanism of the cookie), user privacy is observed (based off the consent provided by the user) and protected by not sharing this data with 3rd parties once its been collected. This both future- proofs the media sales revenue stream as it protects the publisher’s users.
It’s also worth noting that for additional revenue, these data-driven publisher can:
- - Curate audiences that can be packaged and sold across offsite locations in a manner that protects the user’s data and does not require further collection of data.
- - Enrich bid requests with universal identifiers or deterministic IDs that result in higher value bids (owners and users of the myriad of universal IDS know a lot about the users and hence will bid more)
- - Leverage data collaboration technologies such as clean rooms to match directly with demand to create both matched and modeled audiences for high CPM direct deals
As the cookie deprecation and data-driven transformation accelerates, publishers need to invest in the data assets and feedstocks to bridge to the future and respect their users. Failure to do so will result in a rapid demise or over reliance on vendors who’s incentives do not align with the publisher.