The end of third party cookies

The days of third-party cookies are numbered, and this could spell a headache for overworked marketers. 

Why?

At present 65% of marketing departments rely on last click attribution (the process by which marketers are able to measure which touchpoint a customer last clicked on before making a purchase, giving it 100% credit for the sale or conversion). This is despite its noted unreliability.  With cookies being phased out, marketers are losing a way to fix the unreliability of last click attribution, and are now going to be forced to innovate.

Without cookies, multi-touch attribution (MTA), will only be able to see the last click of customers. Whereas before, it used to be able to give credit for a sale to online touch points earlier in the journey, now this data simply won’t be there.  Meaning that it will lurch to last click only, forcing marketers to rely on advice that they know is poor.

Of course, everything’s not lost. For marketers who want to avoid messy and misleading measurement, there is a possible solution to be found in econometrics/MMM. 

This tool can evaluate marketing that appears at any stage in the purchase journey and doesn’t need cookies. Created in a world where data was scarce, the system’s outputs are estimates of how things work, rather than counts of who does what. Therefore, for it to work well, a marketer needs to regularly work with an analyst to bring its true value into the open.

Ultimately, whilst the loss of cookies is a blow, it need not be the apocalypse, as those with their thinking caps on will realise.