The advertising landscape is being refined right in front of us with the phasing out of third-party cookies. Understanding this change and adapting with informed strategies will be crucial for your businesses. 

Take a look at how the experts recommend navigating this transition.

‍Tips for Advertising Success in a Cookieless World

Digiday put it simply: The third-party cookie going away won’t only affect advertisers’ abilities to target ads but also their means of knowing which of those ads led to product sales or conversion events.

How can you implement new marketing measurement tools to successfully fill the gaps and holistically understand where your investment needs to go based on the conversions you’re generating? 

Christina Guo, Director of Growth Marketing at Bamboo said when it comes to removing third-party cookies, companies should take action through the following steps: 

1. Prepare to leverage server tracking and follow the essential steps for CAPI setup.
2. Gain insights into your tracked performance through a channel conversion lift study. (For Google Ads, we recommend reading this resource and for Meta, this article may be helpful.)
3. Review your channel investments and allocations by conducting incrementality and geo holdout tests, allowing you to comprehend the impact of paid media on the overall business.

Erika Dial, Associate Director of Growth Marketing at Bamboo shared her three top tips for companies transitioning away from third-party cookies:

1. Continue building your first-party data through your brand's website and loyalty programs.
2. Check to make sure first-party cookies are enabled on the Meta pixel.
3. Employ retargeting strategies that do not exclusively rely on third-party data.

If you’re looking for helpful resources to kickstart your transition, the Bamboo team highly recommends this article from Adroll as well as Jon Loomer’s article on the elimination of third-party cookies and what it means for Meta advertisers, specifically. 

Fractional CMO & E-Commerce Marketing Advisor, Jim Kingsbury, shared his #1 piece of advice: Focus on solutions that offer more than 1 measurement methodology since each approach comes with significant limitations. For vendors offering multiple solutions, Jim suggests exploring LiftLab, Rockerbox, Measured, or Northbeam. 

Take Sentry as another example. They released an article highlighting their process for completely removing cookies and what happened as an outcome. Matthew Henderson, Digital Marketing Lead at Sentry, shared his advice, “figure out where your attribution is done (CRM, Data Warehouse, 3rd party tool?) and if you’re serious about removing cookies, start discussing the lift it would take to move to a simpler model”. 

“If you were to remove all cookies today, as we did at Sentry in July 2023, it would radically change the functionality of your martech stack.”

Sentry also recommends, at minimum, if you’re beginning the process of removing cookies, to:

1. Institute self-reported attribution somewhere in your conversion flow, 
2. Move all paid channels to utilize conversion APIs, hashed passbacks, offline uploads, etc., 
3. Have conversations about testing new channels that might not have as clear of an ROI as demand capture channels like paid search

It’s important to remember that for many, this is all brand new. Many marketers are going through the same process right now, so connecting in industry communities such as Bamboo’s Efficient Growth Community may also be a great resource for troubleshooting.

There is no time like the present to get started and plan to make changes to upgrade your measurements and strategies. To learn how Bamboo can provide growth insights, expert knowledge, and resources for your brand, see how we can help.