The menace of third-party cookie deprecation looms over the future of targeted advertising globally. With Google’s plan to fully phase out third-party party cookies in 2025, it’s high time to devise alternative ways for data-driven prospecting. Marketers need to rebuild their audience data supply chains so that paid B2B advertising can remain customer-centric.
Let’s consider how GTM teams can make it through the bedrock shift and continue to bring in qualified leads.
Can Targeted Ads Survive Third-Party Cookie Phase-Out?
Before answering that, let’s specify: What is targeted advertising? It’s platform-based advertising that utilizes demographic, firmographic, and technographic criteria to target segments of the total accessible market that are most susceptible to your messages. In addition to these criteria, targeted advertising algorithms utilize browsing history and behavioral tracking backed by cookie files.
With increasingly restrictive policies toward third-party entities accessing users’ browser cookies, the opportunity to track users across the web is closing in. Ad networks like Google Display, Facebook, and LinkedIn might soon be deprived of the data supply that informs personalized, contextual ads. Blocked third-party cookies will also make retargeting campaigns nearly impossible. That, in turn, will literally crush upselling, cross-selling, and customer win-back campaigns.
Still, there’s room for consent-based marketing that enables collecting behavioral data within websites and applications to inform targeted campaigns. Moreover, end-to-end UTM tagging and tracking customer journeys can guide audience segmentation and help build targeted lists packed with accounts that show the most evident buying intent.
Now, let’s delve into methods that will help you build robust and productive prospecting data pipelines.
Sourcing the Actionable Prospecting Data in the Age of Privacy
Collecting and pulling together essential data points demands thoroughly evaluating your current business objectives. Ask yourself: what specific B2B data impacts your revenue right now? What customer intelligence will foster consistent growth and unlock opportunities?
Understanding what data profile ensures better outcomes for your targeted ads is a sure way to build a lean and stable data supply stack, saving you money and work hours. Here are examples of tried-and-true tactics that will help you pre-qualify your most valuable prospects.
Consented First-Party Data
Leveraging owned audience data is your go-to recipe to withstand the imminent Cookie Apocalypse. Here are some crucial points about how to build a viable first-party tracking infrastructure from scratch:
- Establish in-house protocols for UTM tagging. Tracking user interactions with marketing campaigns fuels real-time optimizations, truncates the feedback loop, and improves the attribution of newly acquired leads and customers.
- Scrutinize Behavioral Signal Analytics. Apart from UTM tagging, you should take advantage of GA4 custom event tracking, gathering and analyzing lead form submissions, and heat mapping.
Collective Data Usage
If planned thoroughly, data partnership programs can become a true powerhouse of your audience’s intelligence. In addition to respecting ethical data-sharing principles, you must verify the completeness, relevance, and accuracy of shared first-party data before jumping into a partnership.
Sharing anonymized user identifiers is a legitimate practice that can pave the way to seamless customer identity resolution.
IP Targeting
Identifying anonymous website traffic fosters location-based segmentation of your target audience by location. However, IP targeting alone won’t help you much when profiling your targeted prospects. It should be cross-matched with device type, browser, and time frame of user visits. If so, you’ll manage to successfully deanonymize your persistent visitors and know how to craft more relevant messages.
Tracked IP addresses can be sent to marketing intelligence platforms and then matched with business email addresses stored in proprietary databases. That said, IP-based targeting is considerably limited due to anti-fingerprinting browser extensions and common scenarios when companies use consumer ISP addresses instead of corporate.
Use of Data Enrichment Platforms
Last but not least, we recommend turning your eyes toward B2B data enrichment platforms to cross-match CRM records with contact, business, and intent details scattered across disparate data vendors.
Take, for example, Primer. It connects to multiple trusted data providers to cross-match owned customer data with their records and builds granularly targeted custom lists for you. On top of that, you can export Primer-build audiences back to your CRM and push them directly to Google, Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
Data-Driven Targeted Advertising Isn’t Going Anywhere
The 2022 joint survey by Google and BCG proves consumers still endorse personalized ads. This is a strong reason why targeted advertising will prevail as the major way of brand-customer communication.
Businesses will continue identifying high-intent prospects to reach soon-to-be buyers and nurture mutually beneficial relationships. Conversely, customers will benefit from shortcuts to offers that satisfy their current demands amply. Thus, targeted advertising will endure despite the new reality of third-party cookie phase-out.
