Your Prepper Kit For the Cookie-pocalypse

This week IT Brief wrote that 97% of executives feel unprepared for Google’s plan to phase out third-party cookies.

There was another result that stood out:  There is no single, unified metric for measuring Return on Investment (ROI) by about half of marketers.

That’s a bit of a “Whoa, Nelly!” survey result.

With that, we’d like to offer some tips for your prepper toolkit:

• Even for performance-based, digital-only marketers, models exist to attribute media and calculate ROI that is not based on cookies or even audience identifiers. These algorithms evaluate historical sales and ad investments over time to determine causal impact.
• And guess what else? These models can integrate offline media investments, macro influences like weather or interest rates,  and offline sales data (if “sales” is what you’re modeling). The ROI is calculated against all of those variables. (We once built a model that calculated the incremental online grad school registrations as attributed to each reported case of Covid. In this example, Covid was the macro variable.)
• It’s almost anyone’s guess what will happen with cookies or other consumer behavior data given the dynamic regulatory environment we’re in, but “Be… Prepared” for behavioral data to vanish. Start testing paid media with non-cookie data sets; partial cookie data sets; contextual targeting and even really inexpensive general inventory. There is surprising CPA efficiency in premium placements.
• And even if behavioral doesn’t vanish, “Be… Prepared.” Because consumers don’t like creepy tell-all advertising. No one wants their visits to a plastic surgery website tracked with retargeting ads. Focus customization (which, as an aside, consumers still paradoxically want) with current customers and opt-in prospects.
• When you’re having difficulty scaling ad buys and obtaining measurement signals because the inputs (like geolocation for verified walk in; or purchase behavior through cookies) are faulty, think about combining methodologies. We’ve recently combined geolocation data with panel survey data to measure the incremental impact of terrestrial radio to in-store traffic.

Hope this is helpful, and please know we’re ready to share a bunker.