As third-party cookie deprecation takes hold, cookieless advertising will soon be standard. Fortunately, there are several innovative, privacy-centric strategies that digital marketers can use in place of cookies. In this article, we’ll share these approaches and explain how they work. We’ll also share how Snowflake is uniquely positioned to support both publishers and marketers in the delivery of cookieless attribution, and how it enables highly effective advertising strategies that respect consumer privacy and build trust.
The Current State of Cookieless Advertising
Third-party cookies have tottered on the brink of extinction for years. Finally, at the start of 2024, Google officially began phasing out their use on its Chrome browser. While the expected completion date for cookie deprecation on Chrome remains ambiguous, marketers must begin to face the reality today. With other major browsers already blocking cookies by default, there’s a new sense of urgency for companies to develop a cookieless advertising strategy.
That’s a good thing. Third-party cookies pose privacy risks that jeopardize consumer trust and can negatively impact a company’s reputation. Although no transition comes without challenges, the wholesale shift to cookieless attribution is creating new opportunities for innovation and growth.
7 Cookieless Attribution Methods
Because the transition to cookieless advertising has been so gradual, marketers have had plenty of time to develop new attribution methods. The various methods have distinct advantages and drawbacks, making each ideal for different use cases.
Zero- and first-party data
The deprecation of third-party cookies has renewed companies’ interest in gathering data through the course of their direct interactions with customers. This data comes in two types: zero- and first-party data. Zero-party data is the data customers share willingly during interactions with an organization. Examples include their birthday, gender, product preferences, purchase intentions, and feedback on customer services or products. Zero-party data can be gathered via customer loyalty programs, customer surveys and other data collection methods. This data is highly relevant and reliable since it comes directly from the customer. First-party data comprises information that brands collect indirectly from their interactions with customers, including purchase history, email engagement, loyalty status, customer service interactions and activity on the company’s website or app.
Zero- and first-party data deliver rich actionable insights. But this data is typically siloed — spread across an organization’s CRM, marketing, sales and customer service software and more. By bringing this data together into a single source of truth, brands can create a Customer 360, a holistic view of a single customer's interactions, preferences and behaviors. This detailed customer record allows brands to serve up highly personalized advertising messages based on previous interactions across multiple channels and touch points.
Contextual advertising
Contextual advertising involves placing ads on websites based on relevance to site content. Although the premise is simple, success relies on accurately analyzing page content to ensure the ad is contextually relevant. Before an ad is displayed, the text, metadata, images and video content contained on a page must be analyzed to ensure the intent matches the advertising message.
User identity graphs
Identify graphs are single data stores that bring together multiple identifiers to create a unified view of customers and potential customers. Deterministic and probabilistic matching techniques are used to link together unique customer identifiers, online interactions, social media data and other sources to generate a highly detailed customer profile that can be used to target and personalize advertising.
Publisher-provided identifiers
Publisher-provided identifiers (PPIDs) are encrypted alphanumeric identifiers that publishers or website owners issue to allow a company to track users across their platforms. PPIDs provide advertisers with a useful tool for targeting site visitors. As publishers collect large quantities of data from their customers, they can categorize users into segments, allowing advertisers to serve up highly personalized content.
Data clean rooms
Data clean rooms are secure environments that allow companies to exchange and analyze data without compromising the identities of individual customers. This secure, privacy-protecting exchange of first-party customer data allows brands to run highly targeted advertising campaigns, apply frequency capping and accurately measure campaign performance.
Digital fingerprinting
Every time a customer uses their web browser or phone, a trail of data is created. This information may include what browser, language, OS version, screen resolution and more is being used. These attributes can be combined into a digital fingerprint, a set of identifiable characteristics advertisers can use to track customers as they move across the web.
AI-driven attribution
AI will play a significant role in cookieless advertising. Its ability to rapidly process and analyze data from diverse sources allows it to identify patterns, preferences and behaviors without the aid of third-party cookies. AI-driven solutions combine customer data in real time, using first-party customer data, search history, user behavior and interests to optimize ad delivery and generate highly personalized ad content without the use of third-party cookies.
Advancing Your Cookieless Advertising Program with Snowflake
The Snowflake Data Cloud is ideally suited for cookieless attribution. It offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities designed to help organizations unlock valuable first-party data insights, enhance audience targeting and run campaigns that achieve results while respecting consumer privacy.
Data clean rooms
A data clean room is a key component of cookieless advertising, allowing advertisers to enable personalized segment insights for advertising and campaign attribution in a way that preserves customer privacy. Snowflake Data Clean Rooms are built natively into the platform, allowing advertisers to tap into the value of their most sensitive, regulated data using the latest in privacy-preserving technology like differential privacy. Organizations can leverage seamless data interoperability with partners and customers, bringing sensitive data together for joint analysis, all while maintaining robust data security and governance.
Secure data sharing
Snowflake’s secure data sharing enables privacy-preserving collaboration, allowing advertisers to forge second-party data partnerships with a high degree of customer overlap. Secure data sharing can play an important role in transitioning to cookieless tracking, providing organizations with the means to identify and target specific audience segments.
AI/ML development
Artificial intelligence technologies have placed cookieless attribution within reach. Using Snowflake Cortex, advertising companies can securely analyze customer data and build AI-driven, cookieless advertising solutions. As cookieless advertising becomes the norm, advanced analytics, AI and machine learning allow advertisers to glean actionable insights using their own customer and marketing data.
Third-party data products
Snowflake Marketplace connects advertisers with hundreds of industry data providers, providing access to live, ready-to-query data from an ecosystem of business partners and customers, as well as potentially thousands of data and data service providers. With Snowflake Marketplace, advertising companies can supplement their first-party data more quickly, reduce analytics costs and increase the effectiveness of their cookieless attribution methods.
With cookieless advertising now the norm, the support of a robust modern data platform for powering these complex, data-intensive strategies is essential. The Data Cloud provides this, allowing organizations to accurately track user journeys and attribute conversions across channels and touchpoints — all without compromising consumer privacy.