Filling The 3rd Party Cookie Gap
Why are Facebook, Apple, and Google fighting over privacy and how it impacts digital marketers and advertising.
What’s going on?
Apple and Google’s decision to phase out support of third-party cookies puts advertiser targeting of digital ads in doubt.
The Change
Google announced it will phase out support of third-party cookies in the Chrome Browser by 2022. Apple for its Safari browser and Mozilla for its Firefox browser agreed: no more third-party cookies.
Cookies became a W3C standard years ago. They are helpful for Web applications to remember your preferences on a Web site and in an app: your favorite log-in, favorite page, favorite products, and more. Cookies will stay.
Third-party cookies track your movements from one site to another. Say you were searching for a flashlight on Amazon and went to YouTube next. YouTube reads your third-party cookie, notices you’ve been on Amazon, and shows you an ad for flashlights. YouTube pockets the flashlight advertiser’s money.
Impact on Advertisers
Facebook’s ad network uses third-party cookies to know which ads to display to people on Facebook. It’s the same for Twitter, LinkedIn, and the other ad networks. Without third-party cookies Facebook has less information to target ads. Worse targeting means advertisers pay more for their ads and the ads appear less relevant to people.
What’s Really Going On?
Google is big enough that it can provide advertisers with people tracking through use of its products, including YouTube, Search, GMail, and more. Google does not need third-party cookies for customers that only stay within Google.
The problem is going to be for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and other social sites with ad networks. For example, the Facebook Pixel watches a person click on an ad and be redirected to a landing page or on-line store page for the product. The Facebook pixel works well provided a person clicks on an ad directly to your site. It doesn’t work when a person first clicks on YouTube to view an unboxing, clicks on Amazon to read customer comments, and searches eBay for better prices.
For Google, they own your participation on the Web by providing a bunch of useful services. For Apple, they own your participation by providing you the hardware (a phone or laptop), software and services, and Cloud services.
Now that the digital ad networks — like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and others — have developed a taste for that sweet advertising revenue, there are going to be many efforts to identify your movement from one site to another. They will be attempting to track your digital fingerprints everywhere you go on the Internet.
Some of these will succeed, some will fail. The European Union (EU) will be the gatekeeper of the standards for the ones that succeed. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws will identify the ones that fail.
Clever Moe Solves The Gap
I started Clever Moe realizing that all digital marketers, business owners, and advertisers need a way to do automatic targeting for the ads, automatic tracking of the customer journey from seeing an ad to buying the product in the advertiser’s store, and a single dashboard to place and track ads across all the ad networks. I invented Clever Moe as a Web-based on-line service for every marketer.
Automatic targeting — Clever Moe is a patent pending machine learning engine currently tracking topics from 3.5 billion people’s public discussions. Marketers use Clever Moe to target ads to these audiences. Ads get 20 to 200 times the results of the digital ad networks and agencies targeting.
Tracking — the patent pending Clever Moe Tracking Pixel shows the ads and ad networks that work best for the advertiser, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. This is the first Tracking Pixel to use a single pixel to track activity on multiple ad networks.
Dashboard — advertisers have the single Clever Moe dashboard to let marketers see and compare all the results.
Clever Moe is the way for marketers to use marketing Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to precisely pick, target, place, and track digital ads across the most popular social media ad networks from a friendly single user interface producing 10x better results.
Experience Available To You
When you have questions about any of this let us meet, use the contact us form on the Clever Moe Web site. And I am glad to offer a special bonus for reading this: A one-on-one Digital Marketing Strategy session with myself. To book your session:
Thanks and happy advertising.
