ITP & COOKIELESS ADVERTISING WHITEPAPER SEPTEMBER 2020 INTRODUCTION Internet users have quite some expectations when it comes THE WHY to customer experiences. Expectations that browser cookies At the time of writing, all top five browsers have made unravel, enabling them to match the wants and needs of serious efforts to limit cookie functionality. Combine these consumers with the most relevant content. Cookies are initiatives with Google's plans to phase out cookies in indeed the linking pin: we stay logged in to our email Chrome, and it's safe to say that the "cookie is dead." accounts, allow our favorite brands to save our shopping cart However, with no cookies to rely on, marketeers are flying items, and our most-visited websites to keep preferred blind. And this can be quite challenging. settings. With this whitepaper, we aim to help you to pave the road to Cookies are also the primary mechanism that marketers cookieless advertising. We do so by providing information employ to track user behavior and to serve relevant about the impact of the changes and the initiatives to solve advertisements. However, in today's internet browsing world, the challenges. We will also share our thoughts on what privacy has become a critical topic, and the call for cookie you, as a marketeer, can do to prepare for these inevitable removal is growing louder. Now that cookieless advertising is developments. around the corner, digital marketing will change dramatically. How will you prepare for the "Cookieless Era"? LEGENDA COOKIES OVER THE YEARS THREE POSSIBLE SCENARIOS ● 1994 - 2012: The rise of the cookie ● Scenario 1: The market will adjust ● 2012 - 2020: The beginning of the end ● Scenario 2: Browsers will go their own way ● Scenario 3: No replacement of cookies 1 5 ADVERTISING IN 2020 AND BEYOND ● The impact of cookieless advertising THE ROADMAP TO ● All isn't lost BETTER MARKETING 2 ● Current initiatives 6 MEASURING IMPACT CONCLUSION How will you prepare for the cookieless era? 3 7 FRAMEWORK ● Defining the framework that's being used throughout this document 4 COOKIELESS ADVERTISING COOKIES OVER THE YEARS Cookies date back to the start of the internet and are among the oldest website browsing components. Over the years, a lot has Van changed, but the cookie remained. Informatie Naar Kennis Het search landschap verandert in rap tempo. De belangrijkste trend is de verschuiving van keyword-based search naar een associatieve en op identiteiten 01 gebaseerde manier van informatie linken, waarbij semantische context steeds belangrijker wordt. Deze verschuiving mag nieuw aanvoelen, maar herintroduceert eigenlijk een concept dat halverwege de vorige eeuw is bedacht. 1994-2012 THE RISE OF THE COOKIE Background Advertising The cookie was first designed to 1. Mapping behavior on detect whether a user had already websites, social media, and visited the website before. search engines to enable Nowadays, cookies contain many advertising on relevant pieces of information about a user. products or services. 1st YOUR-SITE.NL This information is used to provide 2. Tracking the clicks on and PARTY an enriched visit based on past views of advertisements to behavior and preferences. The data gain insight into marketing usually covers the following areas: performance. Web usage The cookies that are used to enable 1. Web analytics to customized advertising are generally understand the users' third-party cookies. These cookies are on-site behavior. placed by domains other than the 2. Data storage, including website the user is visiting. user preferences, login 3rd DOUBLECLICK.COM TRACKING-DOMAIN.COM PARTY information, and shopping Cookies are stored in the browser of a cart data, to optimize the user's device. In most cases, they customer experience. contain a limited amount of data. Furthermore, the data provided is These cookies are called first-party aimed mainly at storing IDs to connect cookies, as they come directly from these with data that has been the website or domain the user has collected on-page. visited. Usage of first and third-party cookies Cookies are used in many ways. For By contrast, third-party cookies are websites. As a result, the information example, they remember what items you employed to recognize a user across collected can be highly privacy-intrusive. have stored in your shopping cart, they different domains. Companies like In the beginning, the data stored in keep users logged in, or they recall the Facebook and Google use this technique cookies was mainly used to keep track of form-fields that were filled in. They also to tie the activities of a single user across 'simple' interactions, such as whether a create a unique identifier to recognize a various websites to one user profile. By user saw a pop-up or clicked an ad. user on the website between different doing so, they enable advertisers to However, in recent years advertisers and sessions. understand how a user interacts with an publishers shifted to ways of working ad. They also allow advertisers to place related to building up unique user When it comes to digital marketing and that user in a remarketing list. profiles, making the information stored in advertising, first-party cookies store data Furthermore, they generate broader cookies much more privacy-sensitive. about a user's identification or about their profiles of users' behavior and make These practices led to the planned activities, such as: what did they click? these so-called affinity groups available deprecation of cookies. Or: what pages were visited? This data to advertisers. storage is done on-site. For example, Google Analytics saves a cookie on the Why they became notorious user's browser with a specific identifier. Not long after their introduction, cookies This cookie ties the different page views became notorious for their privacy to that one single user ID, both during impact. Tracking users was and still is, and in between sessions. As a result, it possible without a user's consent or can establish whether the user is a knowledge and across many different returning visitor or a new one. 2009/2012-2020 Protection Regulation, GDPR. It was Firefox adopted in 2016 and became effective in Following Safari's initiative, Mozilla THE BEGINNING OF THE END 2018. This EU law is a regulation on data Firefox launched Enhanced Tracking protection and privacy within the Prevention (ETP) in 2019, which blocks Background European Union and the European third-party cookies by default and sets From 2009 onwards, cookies have Economic Area. It also addresses the first-party cookies at seven days. prompted numerous discussions. In transfer of personal data outside these 2009, the EU passed a law requiring regions. Internet Explorer / Edge companies to ask users for permission to The limitations on first and third-party place cookies, instead of offering an Browser Developments cookies in the Internet Explorer and option to opt-out. In 2012 this was In addition, June 2017 marked the start Microsoft Edge browsers are minimal. changed, and it was no longer necessary of a whole new level of cookie Some third-party cookies will be blocked to require consent for first-party analytics development. with tracking prevention based on a cookies. Neither was consent needed for tracking-protection list from Microsoft. cookies that weren't used for additional Safari First-party cookies will be set by default. purposes, like those reminding a user Safari kicked off by limiting first-party that he or she had products in their tracking to 30 days and third-party Chrome shopping cart. cookies to one day. Since then, there Google announced that it will start (also read: have been numerous developments that blocking third-party cookies by default https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cooki go by the name of Intelligent Tracking from January 2022. In the meantime, e) Prevention (ITP). With these updates, Google will give users more options to Safari is aiming to improve user privacy control what is being tracked via first and Legislation and control. At the time of writing, Safari third-party cookies. This update won't Another significant factor within the blocks third-party cookies by default, and impact first-party cookies when users European market, and with that, the first-party cookies will only be available don't update or change settings for these Netherlands, is the General Data for 24 hours before being eliminated. cookies. AdBlocking Apart from browser developments, it is important to keep track of ad blocker evolution. Ad blockers obstruct ads, but also disable the insertion of cookies. In February of 2020, Business Insider computed that 763M global devices were blocking ads, with the majority (527M people) on mobile devices, followed by desktops (236M). COOKIELESS ADVERTISING ADVERTISING IN 2020 AND BEYOND To get a better idea of the impact coming from these changes, let's look into the browser shares. On a global level, we identify three major browsers: Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. As can be seen in below image, Safari and Firefox together have a 25 percent share. Chrome holds approximately 50%. Market shares for Europe and the Netherlands differ slightly compared to other regions, but the overall picture holds up: 25 percent of data is missing or incomplete. IMPACT Due to these market shares and subsequent missing data, the creation of a customer journey is becoming increasingly difficult. 'To illustrate this, let's look at the following example: 02 BEFORE ITP Bram arrives on site. One week later, Bram sees Bram has returned to the Payday comes and Bram Bram purchases the item He is recorded as a new a Display ad and clicks it. site (2nd session). He adds comes back to the site for he’s been thinking about. visitor. a few products to cart, but his 3rd session.