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"Every single person who touches digital marketing, even board members, are aware of cookies. This is being brought up now in the boardroom. What are we doing about the cookie problem?" — Jeff Greenfield, CEO, Provalytics
The death of the cookie has always felt imminent, but in quarter four (Q4), it may finally come to pass.
That’s the perspective of Jeff Greenfield, CEO of Provalytics, a platform that delivers artificially intelligent-driven cross-channel marketing measurement for a privacy-first world.
Privacy regulations such as GDPR have affected how marketers reach and engage customers. Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which includes changes to cross-platform tracking and embraces cookieless measurement and events-based rather than session-based modeling, is only accelerating the death of the cookie.
All this means companies must adapt how they target and convert customers with privacy in mind. For big brands, this shift may be the most challenging.
"It's going to take a year to a year and a half for you to really make the changes that are necessary," Greenfield says.
Greenfield appeared on a recent episode of the "Unpacking the Digital Shelf" podcast, "The Funeral Preparations for the Death of the Cookie Must Start Now," to share the way forward for brands.
Here’s his perspective on how a cookie-less world will change everything from retargeting and multi-touch attribution to how brands measure campaign performance.
Greenfield says one of the biggest switches brands must make involves behavioral retargeting.
Gone are the days when a consumer will see a picture of the same pair of shoes in their Facebook feed that they just browsed on Nordstrom.com. Without cookies, brands could also see their paid social media campaign performance diminish.
Greenfield says some marketing teams may already be experiencing this when they log into Facebook’s ad marketplace, warning them that some of their campaigns have been affected and may not perform as well.
With these changes, Greenfield says, brands must make their marketing broader.
"That's going to be a freakout moment for a lot of what we call data-driven digital marketers who believe that the more targeted you get, the better the ads work. But what they forget is the more targeted you are, the more expensive it is to deliver the media." — Jeff Greenfield, CEO, Provalytics
Greenfield says broader targeting will be less expensive, but more impactful. The challenge will be getting brands to make this mindset shift.
No cookies will also affect measurement and attribution. Brands doing pixel-based attribution with tags must adopt other measurement and tracking mechanisms because this attribution approach relies on third-party cookies.
Greenfield says multi-touch attribution stopped working effectively a long time ago for Safari and iOS — but cookie changes will also affect Google users, leading to what he calls "the death of multi-touch attribution as we know it."
Though marketers have been making investment and budget decisions for years based on incomplete data, strategic decision-making will become even more difficult in a cookie-less environment. However, Greenfield has a solution for brands: Focus on impressions, not just clicks.
With today’s privacy regulations, brands must embrace a new strategy to "keep track of how many impressions are in market every single day" rather than looking at users individually, according to Greenfield.
By eliminating cookies, brands no longer have end-to-end visibility into a user’s path to purchase. In its place, they’ll need to start looking at things in the aggregate and over a slightly longer horizon.
Greenfield gives the example of a brand doing a connected TV (CTV) test 45 days prior and seeing a big influx of impressions from a particular city, then getting leads as a result of this test that ultimately generated new business six months later.
"Most brands today, most marketers today, they've got a Google sheet where they're tracking all of their media, and they've got it in there by day, how much they spent, how many leads, how many sales came in, what the total cost is per each one, so on and so forth, and how many clicks, but there's no column for impression," Greenfield says. "So, the number one thing I would tell folks to do is add a column for impressions."
Brands also must realign how they view channels, Greenfield suggests — particularly, not viewing brand search as a cost center.
"It’s actually a conversion event," Greenfield says. "It's a leading indicator, if you will, that your advertising is actually working."
Google Ads, for example, allows companies to look back historically and assess their impression share for their Google brand search term.
"You can look at your clicks," Greenfield says. "You can look at the impressions. What you should see is as you're doing more advertising, you're increasing impressions. As you're building awareness, you should start to see more and more people search for you. That's what some of our clients have seen."
Two Provalytics clients — a $2 billion retailer and a $150 million retailer — have experienced remarkable results with this approach.
The $2 billion retailer was spending a significant amount of money on search and focusing on the bottom of the funnel, but not making as much of an investment in the top of the funnel. Though the company was experimenting with CTV and podcasts, its existing measurement and attribution methods didn’t fully capture the impact of these tests. So, Provalytics came in and analyzed all the company’s previous data, looked at its campaigns holistically, and discovered that CTV and podcasts actually performed really well and helped the retailer fill its funnel.
The retailer eventually shifted some of its budget from underperforming areas and reallocated it to CTV, podcasts, and other upper-funnel channels. As a result, it generated $15 million in incremental revenue the following quarter.
The $150 million retailer also allocated most of its budget to the bottom of the funnel. However, its new chief marketing officer (CMO) wanted to experiment with influencer marketing and do some Pinterest and TikTok tests. The tests performed well, which unlocked an additional million dollars of budget for these channels. That investment ultimately led to $6.5 million in incremental sales.
Greenfield says the lesson here is that to go beyond last-click attribution; you must make a solid case with hard data and take a full-funnel approach to get executive buy-in.
"You need to come in and show them a different view," he says. "You need to access that information and show them how what they're seeing is only a tiny bit of things. They're missing the impressions. You need to show them an overall result. Then you come in with some pinpoint experiments that validate it, and that's when you go in, and you ask for more money."
To overcome ever-evolving privacy regulations and the death of the cookie, brands will need to shift their marketing, measurement, and investment strategies.
Greenfield says it’s important for them to view campaign performance through a full-funnel lens and look at data holistically to better understand how one channel impacts another, and how this ultimately leads to greater brand awareness and conversions over the long term.
In a cookie-less world, brands can’t just focus on clicks. Understanding what drives impressions and then doubling down on these tactics could help them grow their market share. According to Greenfield, brands must take steps now to understand what’s working, what’s not, what to test, and where to invest.
"You need to do something because if you're not being asked today about what you're doing about this, you're going to be asked tomorrow, and you need to come up with a plan," he says.
To hear more of Greenfield’s insights on privacy regulations and the death of the cookie, listen to the full episode.
