Why B2B businesses should be happy that cookies are on their way out

by Jon Clarke , Founder & CPO, Cyance 

Traditionally, marketers have been able to target campaigns by leveraging data from third-party cookies on web browsers. Essentially, cookies allow third parties to identify visitors and see which websites they’ve previously viewed, providing useful insights for targeting.By Jon Clarke (pictured) , Founder & CPO, Cyance 

Yet, as we all know, Google has announced the end of cookies. Though this has been postponed, more and more people are opting out of cookies. Firefox and Safari have already blocked tracking cookies by default, and Google itself has announced that it won’t roll out alternative user-level ad identifiers as a replacement for third-party cookies, making cookies a null and void entity, long before the deprecation deadline.

As such, B2B marketers will turn their backs on cookies over the coming months and will need to look towards future-proofed MarTech solutions such as intent data, that do not rely on cookies to provide a longer term solution that generates the same, if not better, insights into customers and prospects. One such solution is Unified IDs.

Why Unified IDs are the next step

Google, Facebook and Amazon are examples of “walled gardens”. Due to the nature of the services they provide, and how ubiquitous they are, they have a lot of 1st party data to track and engage with users. 

For other players in the digital advertising industry, it’s more complicated. Enter unified IDs. 

Created by advertising consortiums, unified IDs are an identity solution which allow advertisers to recognise and track users across multiple platforms – much like 3rd party cookies, but without the need for cookie syncing and with stricter privacy controls in place.

Unified IDs often work by requiring a single sign-on. This means that when a user visits a publisher’s website and provides their email address and consent, then they opt-in to receive targeted advertising across all the websites that belong to all the publishers who have a unified ID network.

Advantages over cookies

As mentioned earlier, browsers are now phasing out 3rd party cookies. Safari and Firefox only allow 1st party cookies, and that will be the case for Chrome as well in 2023. This, however, is not the case for unified IDs, which will remain a viable option.

Digital natives are a lot more savvy now when it comes to cookies and privacy. They are more guarded about their personal data, more selective, and do not provide consent as easily as they did before, particularly when it comes to 3rd party cookies.  

Furthermore, digital natives aren’t the only ones who are selective – because publishers bear the responsibility and hard work of cookie syncing, they too are careful about whom they collaborate with. Unified IDs don’t require constant syncing, which means a reduced workload for publishers and a chance for advertisers to support each other as opposed to walling themselves off.

Finally, regulations like GDPR and CCPA mean marketers and the digital advertising industry must no longer rely on 3rd party cookies to reach and build audiences. It’s not only in the best interests of users, but businesses as well. What the industry needs is a better, unique and anonymous means by which to identify users – thereby transforming the industry to become more “consumer focused” so that user experience leads the way. Unified IDs are part of that transformation.

Key benefits of Unified IDs

Unified IDs represent a personal, static, exchangeable and interoperable identifier for each user, taking into account their multiple devices. Unlike cookies, which have a relatively short-term shelf life, unified IDs have a longer in-life user identification period. This makes it much easier to build audiences consistently over time and analyse behaviour trends and activation outcomes.

Unified IDs also happen to work in an “omnichannel” manner. This means they provide multi-device functionality and knowledge. So in addition to traditional B2B channels, it is likely intent behaviour capture and activation will take place from newer channels like SmartTVs, wearables and more. 

There is a strong possibility that the use of unified IDs will translate into more reliable user identification and improved audience match rates. This improved accuracy and match rates will be a direct result of publishers and tech vendors expanding their UID network. And because of this, customer campaigns will yield much better results from increased engagement outcomes and an improved quality of intent signals.