The Cookie-Less Campaign

With new cookie-less regulations, paid media is changing too. Cookies — small files stored on a user's device to track website activity — have been vital tools for targeting and measuring the effectiveness of online advertising.

But regulations like GDPR and CCPA have limited their use, and many browsers are phasing them out. Advertisers can no longer rely solely on cookies to target and measure campaigns. Instead, they must find new ways to collect and use data:

• Contextual targeting. Target ads based on the context of a page's content rather than user data — an ad for running shoes on a fitness or sports page.
• First-party data. Data collected directly from users through interactions with a company's website or app, used to reach those genuinely interested in the products.
• Privacy-focused tracking. Methods that respect privacy, such as hashed email addresses or cohort targeting that groups users by similar interests.

Measuring Effectiveness in a Cookie-Less World

Measuring campaign effectiveness without cookies is challenging, but five strategies help:

1. First-party data. Collect and analyze data from customer interactions with your site — purchases, form submissions, content engagement.
2. Contextual targeting. Measure effectiveness based on engagement and conversions from users interested in the content the ad ran alongside.
3. Incremental testing. Compare a test group exposed to ads against a control group that wasn't, to determine the true impact on behavior.
4. Privacy-focused tracking. Use privacy-respecting methods like hashed emails or cohort targeting to measure success while protecting user data.
5. Multi-channel attribution. Account for advertising's impact across social, email, and other channels using multi-channel attribution models.

The best approach in a cookie-less world: collect and analyze first-party data, use contextual targeting, test incrementally, adopt privacy-focused tracking, and consider multi-channel attribution.

Related: why third-party cookies are disappearing — and the case for first-party data.