Cookie popularity is shrinking as sites become more determined to block third-party cookie ads. According to a report by Loyalty Research and Rep Data, “Recent trends toward a ‘cookieless world’ have led to structural changes in what actions, systems, and channels are most effective. This has resulted in reallocation of marketing budgets, clear technology trends, and an emphasis on primary data that has separated leaders from their competitors.” How will the continued change away from cookies impact your client’s favorite advertising media? How should you clients respond in order to maintain their leadership status? Here’s what you need to know.

The Impact of a Cookieless World on Advertising

Advertising Media Today

There are a few clear leaders in advertising media today across both business-to-business and business-to-consumer channels:

Organic Search and Search Engine Optimization: 86% of marketers utilize this advertising medium
Social Media: 86%
Paid Search and Search Engine Marketing: 80%
Over-the-Top Advertising: 57%
Email: 54%

Unfortunately, all of these marketing channels have been affected by the war against cookies. Social media marketing has been impacted the most. 67% of marketers who utilize this channel say they’ve been highly affected, while 28% are experiencing medium impacts. Only 5% are experiencing low impacts. Organic search and search engine optimization aren’t that are behind. Most (64%) of marketers are facing high impacts, while 31% are experiencing medium impacts. And with paid search and SEM, it’s a similar story (54% are highly affected and 42% are medium). Email and over-the-top marketing and advertising are also experiencing primarily high or medium impacts. Overall, most advertising types are being experiencing high to medium impact levels far more than low.

Because of the impacts the shift in cookie use are causing, marketers are beginning to worry. Primary concerns are the ability to drive purchases and conversions and earning customer loyalty and retention.

What That Means for the Future

Advertising Media

Luckily, it seems as if your clients won’t have to change up their current advertising strategies too much because of the reduced cookie use. According to Loyalty Research and Rep Data, in order to “navigate the new waters,” marketers are planning to significantly increase their marketing budgets for:

Organic Search and Search Engine Optimization: 41% plan to do so
Paid Search and Search Engine Marketing: 35%
Social Media: 30%
Email: 27%
Events, Tradeshows and Conferences: 20%

Additionally, many marketers will slightly increase their marketing budgets for:

Social Media: 53% plan to do so
Paid Search and Search Engine Marketing: 47%
Influencer Marketing: 44%
Email: 43%
Events, Tradeshows and Conferences: 43%
Partnership Marketing: 41%

The Plan for Replacing Cookie Data

For a while now, cookies have been used to collect data such as:

Website activity: 93% of marketers rely on cookies to track this information
Capture and track across channels with unique identifiers: 90%
Retargeting: 86%
Email activity: 47%
Cart abandonment: 39%

The loss of this information thanks to the new cookie-less world could have a negative impact on your client’s ad effectiveness.

Marketers have plans to keep their advertising effective by increasing access to the data they need. They now plan to:

Improve data quality across their customer lists: 74%
Focus on first-party segmentation to better target customer on paid channels: 72%
Prioritize market research (e.g. panels, surveys, etc.): 68%
Focus on building new channel partnerships: 68%
Invest in first-party data enrichment and second-party data: 53%

What You Can Do in the Meantime

But what can your customers do for advertising information in the meantime? AudienceSCAN on AdMall by SalesFuel can help. Check out our consumer data to see which types of advertising your client’s target audience took action based on within the last year.

Photo by Tamas Pap