Google recently announced that it will no longer be deprecating third-party cookies on the Chrome browser by the end of 2024.
Instead, they shared a plan for a “new experience in Chrome” where users will be able to actively adjust their browsing preferences. Google is working with regulators and advertisers on the roll out of this new experience.
In response, we’re currently in the process of communicating with our clients about the particulars of this policy shift, but our approach is largely unaltered: The need for a robust first-party data strategy has always been paramount, and this change does not diminish that need.
Many of the features and improvements that Croud has developed with our clients will still be beneficial to their digital marketing ecosystems while preserving the privacy of users.
Croud continues to develop strategies to enhance our clients’ first-party data collection capabilities, which lead to stronger results and understanding of their audiences.
Three of the tools that remain impactful following this change are:
Enhanced Conversions
We have worked with many clients to implement Enhanced Conversions, or the ability to use hashed first-party data in attribution and campaign performance. This includes linking interactions across multiple devices, and gaining more resolution on how to properly attribute user behavior across their digital experience. This gain in precision leads to better targeting, engagement, and ROI.
Consent
Consented measurement is a key tool for any client seeking to protect user privacy while retaining essential information on site activity and attribution. In addition to the forthcoming browser-level features, consented measurement allows the user to customsize what data they make available for use for analytics and advertising, while enabling Croud’s clients to use that data to better serve them.
Server-side tracking
Although initially intended as an explicit solution to third-party cookie deprecation, the implementation of server-side tracking allows for vigorous privacy protections for all users. It serves as a gatekeeper for all media tags while ensuring that no PII is sent to an endpoint without consent, while also reducing page weight on tag-heavy sites.
All these features remain essential to any client seeking to develop an effective data strategy, preserving user privacy while not compromising the ability to record useful data about their site and campaign performance. Despite Google’s recent change, all these tools provide strong benefits that are crucial to any first-party data collection framework.
Importantly, we don’t need third-party cookies to get incredible outcomes.
How we're measuring success
In order to execute our strategy and measure our success, we do the following:
Constantly: Utilize value-based bidding and custom propensity modeling for lagging outcomes to drive automated optimization, while employing run/fix/kill logic on both performance and brand campaigns to identify which creatives and ad groups to prioritize.
Daily & Weekly: Conduct a weekly Insights Action and Business Impact (IABI) analysis driven by Croud’s predictive Machine Learning Attribution Modeling solution that drives daily optimization and bidding at a granular campaign level - incorporating first-party and impressions data.
Monthly: Leverage in-platform brand lift studies and conversion lift studies along with customer experiments, in order to get us to true incrementality measured at all levels. This includes Causal AI to ensure marketing drives maximum impact, and supports 'Trust but Verify' for all our solutions.
Quarterly: Conduct brand creative pre-testing against real brand metrics like Unaided Awareness, Consideration and Purchase intent using live simulated environments to win before we spend. Once running, we run cross-channel brand lift studies to verify our performance and make improvements.
Biannually: Use a combination of Market Mix Modelling with Predictive machine learning- providing CMOs and CFOs with robust forecast simulations for channel budgets, sales and brand targets and analysis of how your brand marketing grows sales, with methods adapted to your brand stage, so you can sustain your growth beyond short-term performance, which allows us to see true incrementality across brand and performance on a portfolio level.
All of this is wrapped in our proprietary Strategic Analytics operating model, designed to directly inject recommended high-value actions into the brands we work with, in the right place, at the right level of seniority, with the right stickiness to actually make an impact for our clients. Our unique model and approach to providing clients with the best measurement solutions allows us to successfully service brands as they seek the next level of growth.
If you have any questions about the recent changes or need assistance with your first-party collection capabilities, feel free to reach out to us for more information and support.
