With the increased focus on user privacy, and extinction of third-party cookies, Google Chrome will be bringing several changes to their browser that can negatively impact personalized advertising.
Without third-party cookies access, ad distribution networks that rely on cookies for personalization will run into a number of issues with data duplication, cross-site tracking, and more.
While it’s tempting to work around these restrictions and try to salvage as much as possible from the existing ecosystem, the ability to target without cookies has been conclusively proven. In this article, we’ll discuss how you can leverage email to enhance any potential impact to your personalized advertisement streams.
Third-party Cookies in AdTech
Cookies are small text files that live on a user’s machine between web requests. These files store encoded information about the user’s relationship to the website currently being viewed. The information stored can be as small as a shared user ID, or as complex as a sorted list of preferences.
As AdTech has grown, this functionality has expanded to include not only the website currently being viewed by the user, but any others that interact with that page. This allows for customizing application behavior based on user behavior across multiple domains, without your marketing team needing to have visibility over the entire process.
How is Google Chrome Changing This?
Google Chrome is working to enhance the privacy of their users. While cookies can be a powerful tool for personalizing a web browsing experience based on a user’s specific interests, it can also carry sensitive data to places outside of the user’s control, which impacts adoption of the browsers that encourage this. Google, despite making a majority of its revenue from advertising, has enhanced the capability of users to opt-out of third party cookies. This eliminates the ability to re-use user data across multiple products, such as using Google Ad Manager to track a user’s preferences.
While on the positive side Google elected not to simply disable this option by default, the enhanced visibility of the permission setting will pose problems when creating a truly unique and engaging online advertising experience.
Closing the Gap With Email
While this may seem to spell doom for personalized ad campaigns as a market space in AdTech, there is hope in a tried and true classic – email marketing! Modern tools like Jeeng can incorporate your application’s critical user data into email campaigns that speak to your users at a level never seen before. By using information you are already tracking about your users, such as the products they buy, what they search for, and so forth, you can partner with the correct advertising networks and target your email campaigns using data that simply isn’t available to cookie-based marketing tech.
Furthermore, unlike the blanket removal of personalization functionality inherent in the reduction of third-party cookies access, working with personalized email campaigns gives you the ability to control your reputation more tightly – and to make adjustments when things go wrong.
Check out this video where our CEO, Jeff Kupietzky, explains this in more detail:
Conclusion
Google has received a loud mandate from their users to enhance the security of the internet experience, and they have been responding promptly and dramatically. While many changes have been relatively low-impact to the general AdTech space, the additional restrictions and visibility around third-party cookies is throwing a wrench into the tech that drives personalized website advertising.
With some minor tweaks and integrations, email marketing can help fill these gaps by integrating in the background, using data you already track on your users to personalize email campaigns for their interests and driving strong engagement despite the additional steps needed. With a comprehensive AdTech system incorporating a robust email marketing tool like Jeeng, you can be sure that AdTech’s loss is your gain.
