Recent privacy shifts—particularly those led by Apple and Google—have resulted in huge consequences for display advertising. According to Apple, for any device with software iOS 14.5, iPadOS 14.5, and tvOS 14.5 and later versions, user permission through the AppTrackingTransparency framework is required in order for advertisers to track them or access their device’s advertising identifier.

Apple defines tracking as the “act of linking user or device data collected from your app with user or device data collected from other companies’ apps, websites, or offline properties for targeted advertising or advertising measurement purposes. Tracking also refers to sharing user or device data with data brokers.”

The impact of these changes, along with Google’s plans to phase out third-party cookies, has reshaped the digital advertising world. For example, this means that for Google Ads, if a user rejects ad tracking, a conversion event won’t track back to the campaign. As a result, you can say goodbye to monitoring ROI. Additionally, interest-based targeting is also at risk of losing impact due to restrictions of the free movement of data on browsers and apps.

What can marketers do about it?

1. Don’t rely on marketing solutions and strategies that depend on single-session tracking cookies.

Third-party cookies were never a perfect system as they indicate a person’s action (such as visiting a website), without knowing who they are or their motivation. Now that privacy changes are further restricting their efficacy, it’s time to move on to new strategies. Identity graphs offer a way to build highly-targeted audiences based on online and offline factors while maintaining privacy. The contacts within an identity graph represent actual individuals but are anonymized so that no personally-identifiable information (PII) is exposed.

2. Match your message and audience accurately to get conversions earlier.

If a prospect is in-market and already looking for solutions like yours, they’re more likely to respond to targeted advertising for a quicker conversion. Fewer visits mean less tracking is required. Intent monitoring matched to high-quality data can close the loop in identifying the most likely individuals looking for what you offer.

3. Use accurate B2B audiences to fuel your campaigns.

Data quality continues to be a major issue for digital marketers. Studies have shown that B2B data regularly decays at a rate of up to 70% per year as people change jobs, switch careers, move or just change their email address. This has been exacerbated by the “Great Resignation.” When using third-party data to fuel your omnichannel campaigns it’s vital that you use a reputable provider, ideally one that guarantees quality. For example, at OMI we guarantee 95% email validity for the first 30 days. Quality in, quality out. If you want quality results you need to start with quality data.

Keeping up with ongoing privacy changes and new updates to single session tracking is enough to give any marketer a headache. Instead, digital marketers should look to alternate strategies that can deliver targeted audiences, no cookies necessary. 

Over 75 million of OMI’s 80 million manager-level and above contacts are matched to the LiveRamp ID graph, including 65 million records from our SMB and medical market databases. Contact us today to learn more about building a custom audience.