Question

What problems does the loss of 3rd party cookies pose to marketers?

Answer

  • Cost per lead has gone up 25-30% within programmatic advertising channels. This has lead to companies increasing budgets and, in some cases, eliminating all spend in these channels.
  • Marketers will no longer be able to "be lazy". With third party cookies, marketers didn't have to understand their markets or customers to have success. The platforms did all the work.
  • Attribution, or how marketers think about attribution, is going away. I can no longer track someone from Facebook, Google, or any other platform through the whole funnel.
  • For companies heavily reliant on third party cookie ads, their sales pipeline will dry up unless they focus on other channels.
  • While it isn't certain what the future holds, 3/5 people interviewed mentioned first party data being a key part of their strategy. This includes traditional channels like email, but also involves retargeting using first party data on platforms like Facebook and Google.
Interviews
Project Name

Stephen

Age

35

Easy to use?

/5

Enjoyable

/5

Incentive Sent?

  • Marketers got a bit lazy with third party cookies. We got keys to pandoras box and we were able to get great results without any effort.
  • With 3PC going away, we have to understand our marketing strategies and customers on our own.
  • This will add to marketing budgets.
  • And it is going to be coming back to trying a lot of different channels.
  • "As a marketer and as a consumer, I liked that I can have more targeted ads."
  • Marketers weren't breaching anyones data. It was the tech companies. They were using the money.
  • Now we are working on targeting people
  • There were plenty of data miners. It is funny because no one knows their names.
  • Uber was doing this
  • So was Wayze. You could
  • For B2C, it really is the same. It is going to be hard to attribute sales to actual campaigns.

Marketing @ LeadFeeder.

Worked in marketing for 4 years, with some agency experience.

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Sarah

Age

35

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/5

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  • 16-17% on average of people who get the prompt on iOS choose to allow their information to be shared.
  • The conversions are still happening. It is the reported conversions from paid media that have decreased.
  • For a CMO, they might not feel anything because they are still meeting numbers. But the paid media team is struggling.
  • The future is very unknown. We really don't know what is happening? Things are being built right now for the future.
  • The ambiguity is hard for people to understand. (We want to find people who have that ambiguity.
  • Unified ID 2.0 is an example of technology that is being built.

  • Clients fall across the spectrum of understanding.
  • Even if they say the understand, they might not. Everyone is using different lingo.
  • What is happening with Apple Apps is different than browsers.
  • By the end of 2023, no browser of any kind is going to allow third party cookies.
  • We have to find new solutions. Not alternatives.
  • Authenticated vs . Known vs unknown.
  • Facebook has a bunch of signed in users. YouTube has both.
  • Facebook is an app. 95% of people use facebook on mobile. The changes to Facebook advertising is killing marketers. Most people the loss is on average 16-17%
  • A user needs to give permission to each app on their phone, not just on the whole. (I'm not sure if this is true).
  • I strive to help clients understand what the impact is on their business.
  • For anything Facebook,
  • All of the big major tech brands (Snap, Facebook, Twitter) didn't meet their projects for Q3 of 2021 due to the changes of iOS
  • Google O&O
  • The unknown world will probably be much greater. 70% of people won't login. So now we need something else.
  • Contextual targeting will be very necessary for targeted advertising.
  • You need to something about people. It is all about first party data.
  • It isn't going to have one solution, it is going to be multiple solutions.
  • Targeting users in google Flock
  • We are renovating a house. We have a new foundation. It is first party data.
  • Paid social will still be a thing. It truly is the open internet that will be most effected.
  • "It is like an onion. Every time you peel it there is more. And sometimes you cry."
  • The media teams are looking at all the media channels. They are the ones who decide how much to spend on each channel.
  • There is information everywhere and it is disjointed.

Hearts and Science is a digital media agency. Media buying, activation, analytics. Marketing Technology team. We work with clients to help them work with first party data.

Project Name

Tyler

Age

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/5

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/5

Incentive Sent?

  • Sales could have been attributed to Facebook aren't linked to Facebook. It won't track as if it came from Facebook Ad. You are looking at the big picture more. What you are spending. Increased spend by $500 per day.
  • "It sucks. The way we do billing is percentage of revenue that is track on revenue. That has dipped by 30% this year. The way we have been billing the performance model. The talks are in the works to get rid of the performance model. With new clients we have added more minimums. $1500 per + 10% of tracked revenue.
  • "The hardest thing is getting clients onboard of looking at the big picture. You have clients that are "my brand is amazing. I'm only going to track what we track in Facebook." Pretty much everything you are getting is because of our agency. Because we are only tracking 60%, you think it is organic traffic."
  • "I'm pretty confident that Facebook will figure out something. People aren't spending as much because they aren't attributing it to Facebook. Before I was pumping money into it. They are looking for other channels. Something different."

People are now able to chose if you want to opt in to personalized ads.

Within the Facebook ads manager platform, they are more limited data they are able to show and also at the same time they changed attribution windows

You used to be able to track for 28 days after seeing an ad. Now it is 7 day

You could see how far they made it through the purchase funnel. "30 people went to add to cart".

This month you had 300 purchase

40% Women

50% men. Age range

You can't see data past the click from Facebook or Instagram.

Before you could see the demographics of people that were in the cart or who actually purchased. You could

  • Women, 50 to 60

Big level lifts to traffic and revenue.

It sucks. The way we do billing is percentage of revenue that is track on revnue. That has dipped by 30% this year. The way we have been billing the performance model. The talks are in teh works to get rid of hte performance model. With new clients we have added more minimums. $1500 per + 10% of tracked revenue.

Facebook Algorithms need to be bigger.

Apple did it to get in on the advertising game. Since that change, Apple revenue from ads has shot up. App store ads.

they would have made the same amount of money if they made. So now you have to do a ton more work on the front end. Figure out with the facebook pixel.

What you would do is:

  1. Climbing product
  2. I can target men 20-30 interested in climbing living in these mountain areas
  3. More expensive clicks.
  4. The last few months we have been leaving it broad. We let Facebook send out feelers. The Algorithm knows who is clicking on it, so it does the work. So we are trusting Facebook.

You would do the same thing before, but it isn't working as well now.

If you have opted out of Facebook tracking, you can't track anymore. If we can't look at Returns on Facebook ads then we.

There is a group it shows up in. Unknown. Basically "unclassified"

Project Name

Colby

Age

30

Easy to use?

/5

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  • Intent data providers. They don't provide you user data. They provide you at the company level. They say, "Someone at this company is interested in ____." Then you go and find those people on LinkedIn and build more targeted groups.
  • "Instead of marketers being able to be lazy, you have to go back to being much better at email marketing, 1st party cookie data, and getting to know who your buyers are. That is the high level."
  • In my past companies, they didn't have to invest much time into who their buyers were. You could understand from a high level, "this is my buyer." But you don't get their goals. You don't understand their problems. You could use 3PC and get enough business without having to do the work.
  • CMOs have a very short tenure at SaaS companies. So they are not incentivized to do long term, good work.
  • The easy way of lead generation is going away.

We help marketing leaders manage the budget and understand where the cost is going.

Say you have a $500k per month google ad search budget. They have different pages and everything. Lets say $100k is going to five different campaigns. In our systems, we are assigning $100k to those investments. As we get leads in, all of the systems are tracking from beginning to end. Other times you need to do it manually or else you miss a lot of data. Then you calculate those costs from someone becoming an unknown person to a known person.

Then when a sales person lands a deal, we can say "Campaign #2 has made $50k."

Marketing managers are thinking about the messaging, and the customer. They are 100% focused on the front end. But then the marketing ops person comes in and says, "This is what we need to do to track how these are happening." 

It doesn't affect my job a lot. It affects the person who is over demand generation a lot. Instead of being able to get all this data and store it in our database. Data security is really important.

3PCL let us go to Facebook, Google, and other players and just tell them, I want ______.

Instead of marketers being able to be lazy, you have to go back to being much better at email marketing, 1st party cookie data, and getting to know who your buyers are. That is the high level.

I can spin up retargeting ads when people go to my competitors site.

Retargeting isn't going away. Google is repackaging things. They are still tracking the crap out of what you do. They are using FLoC. They are going to package these activities.

Intent data providers. They don't provide you user data. They provide you at the company level. They say, "Someone at this company is interested in ____." Then you go and find those people on LinkedIn and build more targeted groups.

It is like mass agriculture. Lead generation was like making corn. You just pumped money into it.

Google is tracking your web activity to every website you go to. So then it can know who buys and keep targeting people who have similar behavior.

People don't go through that much effort to make a campaign. Especially if you have enough money. You could put it into Google Retargeting Network. Facebook Retargeting Network.

If we have depended on retargeting ads to fill our pipeline, that is a big problem. Usually it is cheaper to do retargeting ads than Google Paid Ads. $1,500 to $1,800 per lead. That is a good price.

With some companies they are upside down, spending more on lead gen than they make.

"You have to be a freaking dang good marketer."

It can take 6 months or more using 3PC to hone your audience.

Email needs to be 100% on point

Your demand gen teams are for sure concerned about it. They know a lot more about Google's Floc than I do.

Colby works as a Senior Manager of Marketing Operations at Lively. He lives in Provo. He has been working in marketing for over 10 years and has worked at Domo, InContact, among others.

Project Name

Jeff

Age

Easy to use?

/5

Enjoyable

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Incentive Sent?

  • MarketDial could have great success being a partner for big tech companies to analyze data of their customers. These customers want to hire a third party because they feel it gives them an unbiased analysis. Very true.
  • "I know people who have made a bunch of money being Google partners"
  • What if MarketDial was the place people came to have their data modeled to understand who they need to target.
  • "There is a lot of confusion in this place. Being someone where your customers can come and trust would be ideal."
  • A lot of people do not understand their data. At all. (This is very evident in how MarketDial works. They give us their data in exchange for understanding. Now we are just doing more things with it).

Facebook Conversions API

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2041148702652965?id=818859032317965

Off Facebook Activity:

https://www.facebook.com/off-facebook-activity

What are people doing to combat signal loss?

Stats side

  • iPhone... we just lost all, or most, data.
  • Facebook built their test from Randomly controlled trials. We are comparing the two groups. There is responder bias, many things that can bias your results.
  • They just accept it as biased data and do their best to make it unbiased.

Tech side

  • MarketDial can encrypt data. 2 way encryption.
  • We use data partners to make the data private. No one is breaking rules.
  • Do I have PPI data? We ran a test and we need to match and see what behavior they took.
  • What if we developed the technology to another source and it gets combined in a way that remains anonymous. There are a longer term is to keep people data private.
  • BUT... I don't think MarketDial could be a player. It doesn't play kindly .

When Apple rolls out its privacy thing, we aren't going to share this information. Ok... that sucks we lost this information.

We are going pass this information back, but we are going to wait 1-3 days after. We are going to first prioritize the events that you want. We aren't going to get all the information.  ... we want checkout and other things about it.

We are only going to let you pick 8 events. And we are going to wait 1-3 days after. And you are going to get a batch. I don't know who it came from. But I do know generally.

The other thing is I use the term SIGNAL RESILIENT data. Any time you measure something it is a signal.

That means things that aren't very reliant on stuff.

We could run analysis:

We could run a MMM. You just take all your info in each channel. Based on your info,

Ideas for MarketDial

  1. Becoming a modeling expert. Facebook, Google, Snap, are sponsoring measurements by third party groups. There is a strong market for people to run analysis.
  2. The nice thing is that there is a group of people that will provide measurement solutions.
  3. "We are building third party tools that want to use leverage."
  4. External Platforms. Lets look at Facebook Partners. I'm interested in marketing analytics. I'm interested in an MMM. There is this big legal process to make sure the data is safe. So they will have access to information that you couldn't just go download and get.
  5. I know personally some people who have made a TON of money being a Google Partner.
  6. What I would do is what could I do now. how could we leverage models.
  7. What information would you want.
  8. What information could you get.
  9. Or say, we can't get this information, could we model this?
  10. There is new business line,
  11. Every store for every thing... and they might
  12. What if you could stitch this in a data appropriate way. You coudl take advantage of both worlds.
  13. What if there is a way you could take advantage... tech solutions. Stitch customer data and make it with Facebook.
  14. APT... look that up. It is a company.

The funny thing is.. my CPA is that going up by 25% to 30%. Lets say 50% of people said don't track me. So then that percentage.

They are going to think that the

There is a risk when a company models the data. Because it is. $20 per acquisition.

You could look at last click attribution. There are two portions of this. When I think about CPA... the way we would measure that is we are going to randomly split a group. We are going to compare the two groups. We are going to measure incremental cost.

$100k worth of goods. Test group $200k. Your incremental lift is $100k.

your number of orders

Typically if you are talking about upper funnel channels. So many times, when we acquire a customer.

Typically... models change based on a function of the reward. If you go to an auction model, your price is X. If you say I want to. These companies are find to adjust to fit that. If you think you've lost CPA, you might want to consider.

Ad Platforms can't survive if people aren't making money. We want to have a competitive benefit of why you would. Not really... I don't think there is going to be a long lag on that. I think the tools were built at a certain time to measure CPA.

EXAMPLE: When people run trials on a platform. There are a lot of reasons. They have Chrome as a browser. They know what a cookieless world. They are pretty quick that they have a modeled solution. Then you have Meta, they are going to provide solutions.

The big value for MarketDial to model the data. We lost the data. We don't know what happened. We do know that you have a 70% user base that buys your product. 50% have opted in. 35% of your traffic is now out of the mix. So you could say that my CPA increased. Well, we could just multiply it, that might not be accurate.

What is the lifetime value of an iPhone. So if we know more about your

I would assume that if the CPA went up... it is from 1 less accuracy and the 2 is the trackability. Generally what we find on Facebook, whenever someone.

People will do interest based targeting. Those are often less profitable for the business than if the facebook algorithm. Often almost always, the model that Facebook has built,

They could have been feeding it

A company could run a modeled data. There is a ton that people can do.

The function of cost increasing is not a function of accuracy

Glass click model

You will see that the business starts drying up. you ahve paid search and you have natural search. Paid search is awesome.

Are you wasting money?

This is a problem that people struggle.

People assume that their data is an accurate story. What they don't understand. If your tag got messed up, or the javascript didn't work, or if you hit a redirect. You are going to assume users changed their behavior.

People are changing a lot.

Where it is really valuable is to HELP OUR CUSTOMERS UNDERSTAND THESE CHANGES!!!

WHAT IF WE JUST FREAKING STARTED THERE. CONTENT MARKETING. GIVE MORE TRUTH.

"ALL MODELS ARE WRONG, SOME ARE JUST LESS WRONG THAN OTHERS."

In Europe, there is something called the measurement council. There are agencies, TV people, platforms, basically they get together to accurately measure this information. The people who would be apart of that.

Who should I talk to?

European Measurement Council.

A lot of people don't

People at Apple. People at Google.

Marketing Science... find people who have that. Measure what is going on in marketing.

People who actually implemented this thing.

We don't know what we don't know. Who has the time actually research the things. People are going to do the same thing... they are going to form quick

Jeff works at Meta as a Marketing Science Partner. We didn't go into much of what he did for Meta, mostly due to time.

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Anthony

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Brad

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Thomas

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Thomas at Total Wine

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  • Works at Total Wine
  • Worked at
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Nik

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