Preparing for the Cookieless Future: Implementing Programmatic Identity in 2024

This year is set to significantly disrupt digital advertising and marketing as we know it today. A major change coming next year is the blocking of third-party cookies across most major browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. These small data files have powered targeted advertising and site analytics for over two decades. However, rising privacy concerns mean browsers plan to phase them out entirely by 2025.

This poses an existential threat to publishers, advertisers, and other businesses relying on digital revenue streams. Targeted ads, site analytics, attribution, and more will break without third-party cookie access. Even sites relying solely on first-party data may find their ad views, clicks, and conversions undercounting with loss of cookie syncing.

Thankfully, solutions exist allowing the digital ecosystem to thrive even after third-party cookies meet their demise. The leading savior is a technology called programmatic identity. This allows creating persistent and privacy-safe user IDs usable across sites to maintain targeting and measurement. Read on to understand coming cookie changes, the risks they represent, and why implementing future-proof programmatic identity systems now is essential for any business relying on ad money or site analytics.

The Coming End of Third-Party Cookies
2024 will see all major browsers block sending third-party cookies by default. Google Chrome, the world’s most popular browser controlling 65% of the market in 2022, plans to make this move within two years. Competitive browsers like Safari and Firefox will implement similar policies even sooner, possibly by the end of 2023.

In simple terms, this change means websites will no longer access cookies set by external parties to track users across the internet. They will only access first-party cookies they create directly the first time a user visits their domain. However, external platforms they work with for advertising, analytics, and more cannot leverage site-specific cookies.

This has critical revenue implications for publishers, advertisers, and other ecosystem businesses:

• Publishers lose cross-site tracking needed for targeted ad campaigns. Advertising becomes less relevant, viewable, and actionable for users. This leads to lower CPMs and fill rates.
• Advertisers and DSPs can no longer accurately measure campaigns with third-party cookies blocked. Attribution goes unreliable, making ROI hard to determine.
• Ad tech vendors lose the ability to sync user IDs in cookies across domains. Platforms relying on cookie syncing face significant disruptions.
• Site analytics platforms utilizing cookies for tracking traffic sources, on-site behaviors, and conversions will produce incomplete reports. Critical business intelligence and optimization depend on third-party cookie access.

In summary – many digital businesses lose visibility into their data, unable to maintain targeting and get accurate measurements. The still booming digital ad spend expected to exceed $600 billion globally by 2024 requires planning now to avoid significant revenue and data loss.

Immediate Risks for Site Owners Relying on Ad Revenue
Websites relying heavily on programmatic advertisements risk facing sudden crashes in their income streams soon after third-party cookie blocking goes into effect across browsers in 2024. Some consequences site owners need to prepare for include:

• Lower ad viewability, clicks, and conversions: Targeted ads depend heavily on third-party data for accuracy. With such data inaccessible to demand sources, ads grow more generic and less relevant to each user. This directly reduces ad engagement. Site traffic may raise with less relevant ads, but key monetization metrics sink.
• Higher user abandonment: Alongside lower viewability and interactions, expect bounce rates to increase. Users find irrelevant ads frustrating and leave sites quicker when they encounter too many. Loyal visitor numbers and session lengths decline.
• Ad blocker usage growth: Expect more site visitors to install ad blockers when faced with irrelevant ads they find disruptive. This blocks even first-party ads served by the site owner, amplifying revenue loss.
• Higher user acquisition costs: Growing user abandonment and shrinking traffic from repeat loyal visitors lead site owners to rely more on paid channels for driving new visitors. But declining ad revenues also mean less money to reinvest in paid marketing and SEO.

To summarize, the risks include – plummeting ad revenues from lower performance combined with multiplying costs for user acquisition and retention. Site stability gets threatened along with steady content output, putting entire businesses at risk.

Why Programmatic Identity is the Solution
Programmatic identity refers to privacy-centric methods allowing the consistent identification of users across websites to retain targeting without leveraging third-party browser cookies. Leading solutions include server-side cookies, registration walls, and encrypted email platforms.

They offer essential benefits like:

• Building custom first-party audiences: Sites can leverage user authentication methods allowing building granular and meaningful custom segments. These maintain accuracy where third-party cookies fail.
• Cross-site tracking: Consent-based cross-domain tracking prevents web analytics and attribution from breaking entirely without third-party cookies. However, protections exist preventing unauthorized data sharing.
• Preserving stability of programmatic advertising: Targeted ads keep generating revenue with resilient user identification methods working reliably post the third-party cookie apocalypse. Fill rates, viewability, and conversions improve.

In summary – businesses implementing future-proof programmatic identity solutions today can avoid the large risks from loss of cookies and maintain revenue stability beyond 2024.

Getting Started with Programmatic Identity Strategies
Publishers currently relying significantly on display ad revenues must immediately begin planning and testing strategies leveraging programmatic identity. While some solutions like registration walls may initially dampen traffic, they offer easiest paths toward cookieless continuity. Other consent-based methods balance both goals.

Here are some recommended starting points choosing your ideal programmatic identity solution as a site depending on ads or analytics:

• Assess third vs first party cookie reliance: Conduct audits identifying which platforms depend wholly on third-party data today. Shift strategy focus towards these vulnerable areas like behavioral analytics and programmatic display ads.
• Research leading vendors: Explore vendor solutions in privacy-safe ID platforms, registration walls, server-side cookies, and encrypted email. Weigh options balancing ease of integration with visitor experience impact.
• Test shortlisted solutions: Triage a few promising vendor products based on technology, compliance, pricing, and ease-of-use factors. Thoroughly test across site environments – dev, staging, and production.
• Start visitor consent collection: With a working platform, begin collecting user consent to enable creation of custom audiences for ad targeting and analytics. Alert users to coming cookie changes and why their consent enables showing relevant content.
• Build loyal user datasets: Leverage authenticated audiences to create granular custom segments classified by interests, behaviors, and attributes. These replace behavioral assumptions lost without third-party cookies.
• Future-proof integrations: Update site tags and pixels, ad units, and analytics platforms to leverage newly available first-party data IDs wherever dependencies exist on third-party information today.

While the process requires upfront work, taking action today to shift from cookies to better identifiers helps retain stable revenues and analytics. With under 24 months left, starting now is essential to smoothly manage this tectonic industry shift.