Ahh, yes, the day has finally come. There will be a time, somewhere around two years from now, that Google will no longer offer cross site tracking. This is a doomsday message to 3rd party data companies, Data Management Platforms, Identity Graph solutions, and Dynamic Remarketing companies.
What should we expect in the immediate future?
At first, the data companies will be exposed because they can no longer bucket folks based on cookie IDs. They will quickly look to move their audience identifiers to zip code, zip+4 based and contextually based. That’s fine. Their audiences don’t work very well today.
The identity graphs will be in trouble because they cannot track 1:1.
The largest and most common impact this will have on the average marketer is around attribution and remarketing.
Ok, so what’s next?
My hunch says remarketing remains possible with a clear opt-out in the near future. While the number of providers of the technology comes down, I think that the browsers will allow this type of targeting in some capacity. This is core to Google’s business all the way down to their search advertising. I could be wrong, but we will see how it plays out.
View-through attribution will change. But a lot of the work we do is now mostly click-based and that will not change with this new rollout. Marketing channels that provide quality traffic will thrive and continue to grow in the media mix. Ultimately, lots of network, ad tech, and media companies make their money by showing great post-view attribution numbers. So, they are in trouble.
I think this will help clean up the industry, and help the companies doing great work gain market share and continue to iterate and improve the overall ecosystem.
Since the mobile phone Ad ID is static, there will also be lots of movement there, where behavioral targeting will still be possible in some capacity.
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