Since the late 1990s, marketers have used the cookie to track website visitors, improve user experience and target digital ads towards receptive customers. But the way marketers use cookies is changing. With new regulations around online privacy — including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act — browsers are phasing out third-party cookie tracking, including Google’s Chrome, which is set to deprecate the third-party cookie on Chrome browsers by 2022.
Moving toward this post-cookie world, there is increasing pressure to find innovative ways to target users. This is giving rise to new user-tracking methodologies. The best solution for cookieless advertising may be contextual advertising.
Rather than relying on cookie-driven user data, contextual advertising tailors ads to the environment in which their audience is browsing. Contextual advertising relies on algorithms to select the advertisements based on keywords, website content and other metadata. This way, ads are served based on the interest of the user. For example, if a user is reading an article about running, there could be ads on the page for related products like running shoes. Since they are reading about running, they are probably interested in running shoes.
“Contextual advertising makes it possible to target a niche category and reach users who are currently thinking about that topic,” said Ned Dimitrov, vice president of data science at StackAdapt. “This means that your ad is viewed when a person is in a receptive mindset to see it.”
Contextual advertising coexists with behavioral advertising
Though the post-cookie world is coming, behavioral advertising still has relevance. As restrictions around privacy evolve, this cookie-reliant approach to advertising is becoming more challenging. Marketers are in a tough spot of having to balance their established behavioral advertising strategies with contextual advertising.
At this moment, the best approach is to strike a balance between the two methodologies. This balance will depend on various factors such as restrictions in the region. For example, if a target geographic region is a region that is restricting cookies, an advertiser will want to introduce a contextual strategy. But in regions that are still allowing cookie tracking, advertisers can continue to use behavioral tactics.
The role of contextual will likely continue to grow as the industry heads in a cookie-less direction. This in-between moment presents a great opportunity for marketers to start experimenting with contextual advertising. By getting started with this new targeting approach now, marketers can slowly ramp up their use of contextual advertising.
The benefits of adopting a contextual strategy…
