Ad targeting will not be difficult for e-commerce firms

During all these years, e-commerce advertisers have been designing product advertisements. They target audiences based on data collected from third-party cookies. This is a form of hyper-specific ad targeting that acts as one of the main drivers of advertising spent in digital media.

What kinds of ads will be most impacted by this ‘cookieless’ future. According to experts, it will be those that “sit outside the “walled gardens” of Google, Facebook, and Amazon”. These rely on the sharing of publisher data that drives targeting. Several tactics can be employed. These are programmatic display, multi-channel remarketing such as dynamic product remarketing and native advertising. Without third-party cookies, it is inevitable that these strategies will experience lower performance. At the same time, there will be less personalised advertising. This seems to be the cost for increased privacy.

Another factor that will be affected is attribution. This is the process of “matching the effectiveness of marketing activities back to specific touchpoints where users were exposed to specific marketing activities”. However, with third-party cookies being removed, it will become impossible to find enough data of the customer journey to make attribution reliable. While these challenges might scare you, as an e-commerce merchant, there are some steps that you can take to prepare for this change.


A ‘cookieless’ future will affect ad targeting © Royalty-free image


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