The cookie has crumbled – online tracking faces an uncertain future
THE TRACKING of individuals’ browsing habits burst into the public consciousness last year as a result of Edward Snowden’s revelations about US spy agencies’ online snooping. But it’s an issue digital marketers have been grappling with for some time. The industry standard tracking tool – the cookie – is dying a slow death, and media agencies face an altogether more fragmented landscape in its wake.
Cookies, which allow websites to gather information on a visitor’s subsequent online activity, have long been the mainstay of the $120bn (£72bn) global digital advertising industry. The information facilitates much of the highly targeted advertising underpinning the growth of digital marketing. But the industry is being reshaped, according to Gareth Davies, co-founder and chief executive of adtech firm Adbrain. “Technology is changing, the cookie is broken. Consumers now spend about 80 per cent of their mobile time on apps, where cookies are absent. And the cookie alone is useless for tracking across multiple platforms,” he says. With mobile ad spend set to surpass desktop by 2017, according to a recent study by eMarketer, it’s unclear at the moment how this money will serve the same level of targeting with consumers jumping from device to device.
“People multi-task, and it’s difficult to follow them across platforms,” says Ellie Edwards-Scott of Group M agency QUISMA. She highlights location tracking as an example. An app can pinpoint the location of its user, and push them targeted ads as long as they are using the mobile. But as soon as the person switches to a tablet or desktop, the chain is broken – the information is lost, along with the potential for further personalisation. This is the paradox of tracking at the moment – technological developments can actually lead to a backwards step in terms of the targeting of campaigns in a multi-platform world.
So what’s to be done? According to Davies, tech giants like Google and Apple are taking steps of their own. Both companies now offer tracking services across their software suite – Google, for example, can track activity from tablet to mobile to desktop through its Chrome browser, Android software or Gmail products. And Facebook launched its own version of cookie tracking last year that solves some of the problems.
But these solutions create issues of their own. “It’s undemocratic, and difficult for the marketing industry,” says Davies. With information kept in silos by the different tech giants, it’s difficult to have a fully-integrated, cross-platform data set of the sort that cookies provided when digital advertising was desktop-based.
Davies’s company, and others like it, are making progress in using algorithms to tie all this data together, but he concedes that there is still a need for standardisation of some sort. “It’s a tough nut to crack,” Edwards-Scott says, “but we’re talking to companies that are using interesting predictive solutions.” Demographic data, to an extent, can fill the gap by using statistical information to model the sorts of products consumers may be interested in. But it’s still some way off what Edwards-Scott calls the “nirvana” of fully-integrated, cross-platform tracking.
Liam Ward-Proud is business features writer at City PM