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Where we are on the cookieless roadmap and what you need to do next

Moving on from cookies doesn’t have to mean a complete change to your marketing strategy. Investing in cookie-free campaigns now will enhance your current marketing efforts and allow for a seamless transition as Google finally begins to phase out cookies for good.

2024 marks the year when Chrome plans to join Firefox and Safari in deprecating third-party cookies — starting with 1% of users from Q1 2024 to facilitate testing, and ramping up from there.

So, this is our way of saying: it’s worth getting started sooner rather than later, because relying on cookies is no longer a viable option.

Did you know that most current marketing tools are unable to track cookies in Safari? That some are unable to track users on Apple devices? That customer activity tracking falls after just 24 hours? With 40% of US customers using Safari as their browser of choice, growing to the majority (52%) on mobile devices, this could leave you in the dark when it comes to analysing the true customer activity on your site.

This means that:

  • Customers visiting your site could receive the wrong messaging, making them more difficult to convert.
  • The customer activity, and therefore the overall customer journey that you’re currently tracking and measuring is likely to be significantly wrong.
  • You could be investing your marketing spend at the wrong stage of the funnel, paying more than you should to get sales and reducing overall ROI.
  • Cookies can no longer give you the comprehensive measurement and insight you need to run successful campaigns, so now is a good time to update your approach.

In other words, you need to start working with a cookieless solution as a complement to your current marketing activity. Working with a specialist cookieless marketing partner will enable you to seamlessly pivot your approach to prevent a drop in campaign performance whilst moving away from an over-reliance on cookies.

But we understand, this change doesn’t come without concern. Recent studies have shown that:

  • 50% of marketing professionals do not feel that their organisation is prepared to succeed in a cookieless world.
  • More than one-third of marketers and advertisers do not believe they will be able to confidently reach target audiences without cookies.
  • 11% of marketers have no current plans for new cookieless solutions.

We’re stepping up (and have been since 2018) to address these concerns. Because you can confidently reach your target audiences (despite what one-third of marketers might think). You just need to work with a partner you trust to steer you the right way, through using first-party data, contextual targeting and other cookieless identifiers. And our cookieless campaigns have already shown that, while you may have to say goodbye to third-party tracking, you don’t need to say goodbye to campaign efficiency and high return on investment results.

Like how we worked with TeamSport to attract school-aged children to their go-karting tracks during the school holidays. Using our agnostic cookieless platform, we served personalised creative, adapting to location and position in the buying funnel. We also gained useful campaign insights such as booking curve and track-specific performance to understand how each tactic performed and optimise future campaigns; giving more weight to particular locations, targeting around key trading periods, and ultimately driving the very best results.

We can show you the way to the cookieless future, via maximising your first-party data, choosing smarter contextual targeting and opting for a connected cookieless platform that is compliant, transparent and efficient in a world that requires nothing less.

Read our guide to achieving even better results in the post-cookie world, or get in touch to find out more.