2021 was unkind to marketers; as David Grohl would phrase it, we are "learning to walk again." It's the end of third-party cookies and the beginning of people having more control over their information, how it's tracked, what can be collected, and what they are comfortable sharing with your business.

It's important to understand how all the changes to data privacy have affected how businesses communicate and sell their products to consumers. And with all third-party cookies going extinct by 2023, it's likely that in 2022 these changes will get expedited.

Cookies are essential to how marketers serve relevant ads to consumers and drive growth. Almost every company with an online presence relies on cookies to collect consumer data on the web and use it to identify those who are most likely to buy their products and services. With third-party cookies out the door, organizations are left trying to find a way to target ads to their audience and now meet the consumers' expectations on data privacy. 

First-party data is the answer.

The best place to start is by looking at how much of your data is tracked by first-party cookies and creating a plan to manage consumer data this way. It will be equally important to pay close attention to evolving privacy laws that introduce challenges for platforms and publishers. The new rollout of Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework and iOS 15 updates has created the biggest challenges for marketers because now it's next to impossible to measure performance accurately and know where to serve ads. Apple wasted no time at all to make these changes effective, leaving even the most experienced marketers trying to figure out a way to launch campaigns efficiently and without performance tanking.

Measurement and Attribution already sucked.

The impact of measurement within platforms and publishers has taken a hit, but the ability to measure performance and correctly attribute marketing campaigns, which was already hard to do, has just become more complex. 

Let's take a moment to think about performance data and the challenges marketers had pre-cookie apocalypse:



• Getting advertising attribution that covers over 90% of your conversions with accurate insights is complex and error-prone.
• Most attribution providers, including Google Analytics, depend on you assigning the correct UTM parameters to your ad campaigns. But the web and web browsers behave in unexpected ways, and you miss out on a wide range of traffic and attribution data.
• Many other attribution platforms just aggregate data from other platforms or don't tie end-to-end from ad spend to conversion journey.

While the situation is challenging, it presents an opportunity to discover innovative and next-generation methods that properly measure and attribute digital marketing campaigns—of course, being fully aware that some companies will overpromise for attribution and identity resolution.

Advertising without third party cookies

As governments regulate data, businesses must adopt new mechanisms to identify consumers without dropping a third-party cookie on their computers. Teams can build a first-party data strategy to enhance the customer journey with compelling touchpoints that encourage opt-ins from consumers through owned channels. They can also use consumer data solutions like LayerFive, a unified consumer data platform. 

We provide a first-party tag that can convert into a server-side tag; this allows us to capture richer data giving you higher visibility across all conversions. We account for all the web traffic situations where all the right referrer sources and ad campaign information may not flow in a pre-defined way. E.g., Facebook advertising traffic shows various characteristics, including having fbclid parameters on the ad URLs. We constantly look for various URL characteristics and assign the web traffic to the correct bucket. 

Over and above that, we can easily add additional referral or paid media sources that might be getting bucketed into "Others." If some referral source is vital and brings significant traffic but is not a well-known source, it may get bucketed into "Others" or "Unknown" in other analytics and attribution platforms. With LayerFive, we can easily configure additional referral sources to track. 

What's more, we can integrate into your order management system, e.g., Shopify, and connect end-to-end dots. So you can see how many orders along with the order ids are attributed by LayerFive vs. the number of orders you have in Shopify. This allows you to have full visibility into attribution and gives you the confidence that you are working with real data rather than modeled data provided to you by individual ad platforms.

Breaking down ad impressions

LayerFive attributes ad impressions that didn't result in clicks by using a patent-pending algorithm. LayerFive's view-through attribution model doesn't depend on any third-party data or cookies and provides a way to understand the full impact of your Facebook or other display media campaigns that may be delivering a high volume of ad impressions. Facebook has been attributing such view-through conversions without giving an accurate and precise breakdown of how many conversions are click-through vs. view-through. With LayerFive, you can break down the click-through vs. view-through conversions and do it across all digital media sources delivering ad impressions.

Stay ahead of the curve.

Shifting conditions led us to cookie-based advertising in the first place, and even though it's hard to know what the cookieless future holds, we should assume the conditions will continue to shift in a direction that protects the privacy of our consumers. And, organizations need to be ready and willing to comply, but you don't have to do it alone. It's time to take the next steps and start leveraging your owned data and managing privacy compliance. 

If you'd like to learn more about how LayerFive's first-party data collection, contact us here to schedule a demo at your convenience.