It’s hard to imagine a world without cookies.
But for online advertising, that world is fast approaching… and marketers need to start preparing for a strict no-cookie diet.
So Joseph Kerschbaum recommends building your audience in two ways:
- Squeezing every last drop from third-party tracking before it sunsets in 2024.
- Importing first-party data to your PPC advertising platforms.
Already done that? Good.
Now it’s time to start expanding your network:
Use similar audiences. Major PPC platforms like Google and Microsoft provide “similar audiences” segments, which is when the algorithm finds users with similar online behavior.
Yes, it’s a third-party audience feature, but it could stick around because it’s based on search history and account profile data.
Build affinity and in-market audiences. These are users that are searching for a specific product, which means they’re high-intent, short-term audiences.
The main upside of these audiences is that they don’t need to be built off your first-party audiences and they’re created by on-platform usage, making them “durable.”
Use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) predictive audiences. This segment blends your on-site audience data with predictive algorithms within GA4 to determine potential user actions.
For instance, GA4 may predict likely purchasers, 28-day top spenders, and more.
Play around with the Topics API. Google has proposed a few cookieless tracking solutions, but their Topics API in particular seems promising.
Here’s how it works: Chrome determines topics and interests based on a user’s 3-week search history. Brands can target those topics to deliver specific ads. After 3 weeks, the topics are deleted.
Since it’s privacy-friendly, it may just be a key tool for expanding your audiences in the future.
Time to throw away the cookie jar… We’re entering a new era. Start planning sooner than later!
