Brands are increasingly questioning how a world without cookies will impact their future measurement strategies. Although the demise of the industry’s “single source of truth” was recently postponed by Google, its phase-out is indeed inevitable.

The advertising industry, typically optimistic, initially hoped for a single, neutral heir to replace the cookie empire, which has reigned supreme over digital advertising since its inception more than three decades ago. The optimism, however, is being confronted with reality: brands are now preparing to work with multiple new identity solutions, such as UID 2.0, ID5, RampID, Yahoo Connect, and Privacy Sandbox, alongside an already fragmented measurement and media landscape.

Google began its cookie purge this past January, starting with 1% of Chrome users, and recently, delayed full deprecation for a third time—now slated for some time in 2025. Regardless of the timeline, the train has left, and advertisers are now realizing that using multiple identity solutions will impact numerous metrics used to measure performance.

Navigating the Measurement Maze

There are more than 200 different measurement companies in the advertising space, generating some $20 billion in revenue, according to Procter & Gamble Signal360. Measuring success varies by client, goals, platforms, and product verticals, and this makes for a convoluted ecosystem that advertisers struggle to navigate. For instance, there are measurement partners that specifically track travel bookings, another for brand lift, another for social sentiment, another for brand safety. Managing that many partners and evaluating so many disparate metrics is adding to overhead and workloads of marketing professionals.

Many experts are also expressing concern with Google’s Privacy Sandbox. Reporting will be less granular and less real-time. Traditional methods, such as cross-device reach and optimal frequency, will be limited and require workarounds.

Advertisers will instead increasingly fall back on marketing mix modeling, which does not rely on cookies yet is notoriously slow to return results, and probabilistic types of measurement which are less precise. The last and potentially most promising option is first-party, consented commerce data. It can be sourced from retailers, brands that collect first-party data, and commerce data providers.

Back to Basics

As the industry grapples with these complex challenges, it's becoming increasingly clear that a return to fundamental principles may offer the most effective path forward.

The loss of cookies gives the industry an opportunity to clear the decks and cut the clutter. No matter the initiative, the ultimate goal of any campaign is always sales. Instead of falling back on probabilistic methodologies, marketers can prioritize data and measurement providers with access to deterministic, consented, first-party purchase data. By using this deterministic purchase data, marketers can better understand which tactics are resulting in actual incremental sales, and fast-track their way to the bottom of the funnel.

Further, explicit content from consumers enables seamless identity tracking, eliminating the need for alternative identifiers. The industry needs simplified solutions, not another workaround to enable tracking methodologies built last century.