Will Losing Third Party Cookies Impact B2B Advertising?
In many ways, the third-party cookie has fueled the internet’s evolution over the past two decades and given rise to some reliable, successful B2B marketing strategies. While we haven’t yet seen the full impact of the loss of the third party cookie on digital advertising, many industry experts believe the following tactics may face some tough challenges:
- Remarketing and behavioral targeting: This has been the bread and butter of digital marketing. Without third-party cookies, marketers will lose the ability to build cookie-based audiences. They’ll no longer be able to serve ads across the internet to users who have visited their websites or serve ads based on someone’s browsing behavior.
- Account-based marketing: Marketers have relied on the third-party cookie to target very specific attributes within a group of prospective customers. Without cookies, narrowing that audience to a specific persona based on demographic or firmographic targeting will likely become more challenging.
- Programmatic advertising: As advertisers pressured their technology partners for high-quality scale, ad tech companies delivered programmatic advertising. This method relies on third-party cookies to collect anonymized user data, segment audiences and serve personalized, targeted content at scale. When the browser blocks cookies, this highly lucrative and popular strategy will no longer work. Adtech companies that have built demand-side platforms (DSPs) or data management platforms (DMPs) will be most affected by this change. DMPs rely on cookies to collect anonymized user data and segment audiences. Publishers may also suffer because they will lose the ability to find and scale those audiences.
- Attribution: Marketers constantly debate which touchpoint attribution model (i.e. first click, last click, etc.) can take credit for generating revenue. Those discussions will subside without a third-party cookie to track view-through conversions and activity across multiple digital touchpoints.
If you’d like to learn more about what a cookie-less internet might look like and how it could impact your B2B marketing strategies, download our eBook, “A World Without Cookies: A Guide For B2D and B2B Tech Marketers.”
