by Steve Pinto (Global lead – Targeting, Addressability and Privacy Go To Market, Amazon Ads)
The long-anticipated and seemingly-inevitable change has been in front of the advertising and marketing industry for the last seven years. While it seemed like a distant maybe in 2017, we’re past due to shift away from third-party cookies and towards new, more effective solutions to deliver your brand’s messages to consumers. It doesn’t matter when – in 2025 or even later – virtually the entire web will likely be anonymous soon, and preparation for the shift must start now.
If the timeline shifts put a pit in your stomach, we understand. Luckily, you don’t need third-party cookies to create relevant marketing moments. The wide range of signals available through consumers’ accelerating shift towards subscriptions and memberships, combined with advancements in AI, offers even more accurate opportunities to gain relevance for your brand.
Let’s focus first on what stays the same. Advertisers must get their message in front of the consumers who are open to hearing it and positioned to act on it. They also need to understand the value their marketing delivered and where they can improve on that value next time. What has changed is how we get there. Solutions involving first-party signals, modeling and contextual are the leading answers. Still, the roadmap toward a fully world without third-party cookies is more nuanced than just utilizing available signals.
Forget third-party cookies; follow the breadcrumbs
Let’s acknowledge that curiosity, interest and intent drive consumers all over the web throughout their day. Maybe they order a new backpack for their next hiking trip, but then watch a travel documentary for inspiration. From there, they build a playlist for their trip and then log onto their credit card rewards site to book a hotel. Any opportunities to serve an ad along this journey will contain hundreds of signals pertaining to these consumer events and behaviors during specific moments and can indicate interests and affinities.
That journey is a mosaic of opportunities for advertisers to show a relevant message that resonates in the moment. Focusing on relevancy drives a seamless experience with a timely, personal feeling, transforming every interaction into a meaningful engagement. Continuing with the example of our hiking consumer from above, we must blend the interactions we can see with what we can’t. By making observations on all of the signals available to us, we can predict their interest and motivations to create relevancy.
Meeting your customers where they are with Amazon DSP
Amazon DSP provides an actionable path throughout those environments. We do so by leveraging hundreds of millions of direct connections with consumers and marrying that with AI driven predictions. As consumers engage with Amazon throughout their day —logging in, subscribing, shopping, streaming or listening, we gain insight on a wealth of daily signals on consumer preferences. This continuous value exchange provides valuable insights into their journey from interest to purchase, enabling us to create ad relevance at every touchpoint.
This signal-based strategy for addressability has been central within our playbook since the beginning of this decade, and our longevity in this approach now gives us unique tools to scale these solutions in a world without third-party cookies. Along with advertisers own first-party signals, our unique relationship with consumers can accelerate brands’ ability to connect and build trust with them everywhere ads are served across the open web. Consumers have grown to expect personalized product and content recommendations from Amazon, and this trust naturally extends to the ads we show them. By ensuring your brand appears in an organic and relevant way, we forge deeper relationships with consumers and advance your message and ad impact together.
A proven path to brand exposure
These new, innovative approaches to reaching the right consumers for your brand is uncharted territory for many advertisers, but Amazon DSP is already seeing promising results. Amazon DSP can reach over 70% of anonymous traffic in relevant ways because of AI-based prediction and context. Focusing on relevancy, advertisers see a 20-30% increase in reach on browsers and devices such as Safari, Firefox, and iOS. They also see a 25% increase in ad engagement rates, and a 12% improvement in CPM efficiencies thanks to these models.
While these results are promising, we expect to demonstrate our joint success in subsequent quarters as the mix of signals that can feed into improving and optimizing our models changes.
The time to start is now
It’s time to stop talking about a future without third-party cookies and start using the durable solutions available now. Amazon Ads solutions provide the foundation for successful relevance, but what helps a brand make the most of these tools are the insights they bring to the table. Combining signals from Amazon DSP with insights from an advertisers’ own customer base focuses our ability to create strategies that reach your ideal consumers at the most relevant and impactful moments. This combined effort leverages your brands’ deep understanding of their consumers and our expertise, enabling more accurate predictions and that you can deploy in your full-funnel marketing strategy.
Where to start? Our ad tech ensures advertisers meet audiences where they are and make metrics-based decisions; two key factors in our soon-to-be world without third-party cookies.
- Leverage APIs and ad tags to feed first-party signals — from conversions to interactions — directly into your campaigns. This allows our models to understand your definition of success, adjust accordingly, and also act as the foundation for further optimization.
- Utilize clean room technology to securely upload your first-party audiences, enabling the creation of richer audience segments in a more controlled manner – choosing the right audience size, and tailoring the right level of affinity based on brand objectives.
- Be open to experimenting with new predictive models and contextual solutions, so you can understand what works for your brand and help you prepare for future changes.
- Utilize a comprehensive set of full-funnel measurement tools to accurately assess your campaign’s effectiveness. This includes solutions that use modeling to understand engagement and conversions without the need of third-party cookies, as well as clean rooms for merging signals to analyze aggregated performance.
Taking these steps now will provide you with the runway necessary to elevate your success when third-party cookies are completely phased out of the market, and the industry shifts to a new approach of addressability.
