Online advertising is a broad field: Insta campaigns, TikTok, Google Ads and Google SEO are probably the most important. They all have three things in common:
- They are AI-controlled.
- The AI needs information in order to optimize your campaigns.
- They cost money and, if they are to be of any use, not exactly a little.
The AI is basically there to deliver as many desired results as possible with your budget. For example, if you want a lot of views, the respective AI looks at which target group delivers the most views on which platform in which area at which time and plays out your campaigns there more often. This is still quite simple.
But what good are views if none of them book an appointment? So it’s better for the campaign to know which of the views click on your ad and end up booking an appointment or buying a voucher.
And this is what online advertising platforms have been doing so far with so-called 3rd party cookies. This allows them to track visitors across multiple platforms (Insta, Google search, your website, …). But this will end by the middle of the year at the latest.
What are 3rd party cookies?
A brief explanation of these 3rd party cookies (statistics and marketing):
When you start a campaign, you are the first party in online advertising. If a customer sees your campaign and clicks on it, he/she is the second party (2nd party). The advertising platform (Google, Insta, TikTok…) is then the third party (3rd party). And it tries to collect information via cookies.
Because a customer doesn’t always see your campaign and click on book straight away. Customers usually see them more often, in different places, before they become active and then possibly even via a different platform than the one on which they first became aware of you.
So if the AI wants to know where to find the best leads, it must be able to recognize visitors over a longer period of time (e.g. 60 days) on different platforms (website, FB, Insta, Google Search, TikTok, …). And to do this, it creates a so-called 3rd party cookie for each visitor in the memory of their browser.
Cookie lifetime and blocker
Apple Safari was one of the first browsers to automatically limit or completely block the lifetime of 3rd party cookies. Other browser manufacturers followed suit and Google will also limit the lifespan of cookies to less than 24 hours in the middle of this year. Firefox and Safari are now installed with the option “Automatically block consent to advertising cookies” as standard and ad blockers also block these cookies, even if the visitor has clicked on “OK” in your cookie banner.
This means that the AI of your campaigns can no longer recognize which views will ultimately generate money. It therefore works blindly.
Campaigns become inefficient and expensive
Your campaigns will continue to run as normal, so you won’t notice anything at first. The AI simply takes what it has: Views and clicks and optimizes your campaigns accordingly. This means that target groups that watch and click a lot, e.g. children and young people with a little cheat in the age information in their profile or who surf with mom/dad’s cell phone, are targeted the most. Even people with a lot of time (but little money) suddenly become highly attractive for your campaigns.
In short: You have to put more and more money into your campaigns to get the same amount of bookings in the end.
Server side tracking turns 3rd party cookies into 1st party cookies
But there is a solution to this problem: Server Side Tracking, or SST for short. Don’t be put off by the technical details, there is a simple solution, but more on that later.
With SST, you operate your own proxy server. This belongs to you and is controlled by you. All your campaign cookies then run via this server and become 1st party cookies (you are the first party in the game). On this proxy server, your visitors’ information is anonymized (e.g. by replacing the IP address with an internal ID) and only then passed on to the advertising platforms. And of course, this server is located within the EU.
This has three wonderful effects:
- These cookies no longer contain any personal data and are therefore per-se data protection compliant.
- The integration of your proxy server can take place independently of any cookie consents.
- You determine the lifespan of your cookies yourself and can track visitors for up to 2 years.
Sorry, but you still need your cookie banner. Because if the visitor says that they do not want marketing cookies, you are not allowed to track them in this way either. But you can bypass the automatic browser blocks and the visitor’s actual consent applies.
Feasible and affordable with Taggrs
Over the past few months, we have been working intensively on this problem for you and have developed a solution together with a provider from the Netherlands, which we have now also successfully implemented for our studio Into The Light.
You need an account (container) with Taggrs and two containers in Google Tag Manager (one client, one server). All other services (Ads, Analytics, FB, Insta, TikTok, …) are connected in GTM. All your campaigns, regardless of which platforms, will then continue to run as normal, only better.
Taggrs offers a simple administration interface, really good tutorials for the changeover and is also unbeatably cheap with a monthly subscription price of €25 (for up to 750,000 requests/month).
And since we are a partner of Taggrs, you can also have the Taggrs container created by us so that we can support you in setting it up.
Interested?
Then simply send us a short inquiry using our contact form and we will discuss everything else. We would be delighted!
Your
Lemmi.