Why Third Party Cookies and Last Click Attribution are not enough in the Modern Age of Digital Marketing.

 If you run an e-commerce or lead-gen website, then tracking results and traffic will be a vital part of your website, being the foundation of all of the decisions that need to be made when it comes to making improvements. As technology and data laws evolve, marketers must ensure that they are employing the best possible solutions to thrive in the modern age of digital marketing.

Here are some of the issues that arise with over-reliance on third-party cookies:

1. Data Loss Due to Third-Party Cookie Blocking
   • Ad platforms will lose visibility on user behaviour across sites
   • Retargeting & Remarketing will become ineffective
   • Conversion Tracking will be incomplete
2. Poor Attribution & Underreported Conversions
   • Doesn’t account for multi-touch user journeys
   • Can lead to incorrect budget allocation
   • Misleading data can result in cutting effective ad campaigns too early
3. Increased Ad Costs & Lower ROAS / CPA
   • Facebook, Google & TikTok Ads will struggle to optimise targeting and bidding
   • Lookalike and retargeting audiences will shrink and become less effective
   • More money will be wasted on irrelevant clicks, increasing cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
4. Less Effective Personalisation & Retargeting
   • Personalised ads will become less relevant
   • Retargeting ads will lose effectiveness
5. Compliance & Privacy Risks
   • Possible fines and legal trouble if user data is collected without consent
   • Lower trust from users, leading to higher bounce rates & lower conversions

Server Side Tracking

Server-side tracking essentially removes the reliance on third-party cookies, allowing marketers to host their tracking solutions on their own servers. This solution helps bypass the restrictions of third-party cookies, which have already been phased out by browsers such as Safari. Furthermore, the increased control over tracking allows for more accurate data, improved privacy for users and less reliance on vendors. Server-side tracking is a more advanced solution, but will eventually be the mandatory solution for websites that rely on website data to fuel their marketing efforts, be that in paid media or just general advertising.

Enhanced Conversions

Enhanced conversions is a solution specific to ad platforms and is essential for serving ads in a world without third-party cookies. Enhanced conversions send user-provided data to ad vendors to help improve attribution and audience matching capabilities by including data such as email addresses, name and address. By doing this, ad vendors are able to match users up across devices and different sessions, significantly improving attribution and the data being fed back into the algorithms that power ad platforms. You can find out more about enhanced conversions for the following ad platforms below:

• Google Ads
• Meta Ads
• Microsoft Ads

Marketing Mix Models

No matter what solutions are provided to marketers, we are never going to get completely accurate attribution data into analytics tools such as GA4 and ad platforms such as Google. Marketing Mix Models use advanced modelling techniques to measure the effectiveness of marketing spend to determine which channels provide the strongest ROI. Using methods such as Marketing Mix Models is essential to ensuring marketers are not over reliant on attribution models created by ad platforms and analytics platforms, but expanding the scope of their business intelligence to help influence informed and data-driven decisions. Marketing Mix Models have become even more accessible to the general marketer with Google’s introduction of Meridian, a tool available to all users that will help develop marketing mix models relevant to your business. Read more about it here. 

While it is still possible to rely on third-party cookies and last-click attribution, there is a strong imperative for digital marketers to switch over to these new tracking solutions, especially if they are running paid advertising. With many businesses still relying on third-party cookies and last-click attribution, there has never been a better opportunity to adopt more advanced marketing analytics solutions to help improve business intelligence and fuel strong business decisions.

Author: Liam Driver, Paid Media Specialist