I kept waiting for their findings but halfway through it's just a bunch of self-gratifying talk and deflecting talking about why they think it's important - I read for two solid minutes without them getting to any hard numbers or findings.
I skimmed the whole article, read your posting, and even though I know some of these words, I still have no idea if the decision was hurtful to the business, or if it did not move the needle at all, or if it even was a net positive, all things considered.
It's incredibly hard to tell. For us the goal of eliminating Cookies was important given the stance we have on privacy so everything went from there. The folks working in marketing for sure were not happy with the directive as it makes their job much harder.
But the world is still spinning, even without cookies. That's enough to call this a success.
Heh, that's very much like the old "... and nothing of value was lost" then.
- Cookies weren't doing a whole lot for them to begin with, and removing their use had negligible impact.
- The other work their marketing department did to try and compensate for discontinuation of cookie usage interfered with the test, making the results useless for evaluating the value of cookies.
I'm leaning towards the second one based on the response above you.
If the point is to quantify the value of cookies then you need to measure that as an independent variable. Attempting to compensate with other actions, each of which you also don't know the independent value of, means you will be unable to quantify the true value of cookies or the value of your other actions.
What if none of the tools they're using, including cookies, provide any measurable value? How would you know? What if the value of cookies (X) and item A is positive in terms of impact, but B and C are both negative, but not enough to offset A so it comes out in a wash?
Laws like ePrivacy in the EU do indeed have specific provisions regarding cookies but e.g. the GDPR is much broader than that and would still apply. How truthful is it that eliminating cookies is motivated by a strong stance on privacy rather than just getting a head start in marketing instead of having to scramble when Google pulls the plug? It doesn't sound like you reduced the tracking and behavioral analysis beyond what was technically unavoidable?
I mean, based on my interactions with marketing people, they often don't really know if much of what they've done has helped the business at all, and the majority of their work (apart from actually creating marketing copy and interacting with customers) seems to revolve around figuring out how to attribute booms in business to their previous campaigns while building plausible deniability for inevitable busts. Don't get me wrong, not ALL of it is completely incomprehensible: email and referrer links are pretty straightforwardly calculable in terms of their impact; but things like "brand awareness" campaigns are nigh impossible to actually gauge the impact of.
It took awhile but I finished the article. I don't see much self-gratification in phrases like:
> we saw around a 30% increase in our cost per click (CPCs) in Google search.
Or this:
> This took a TON of back and forth, basically building logic that an out-of-the-box attribution solution already has in SQL, but we finally got to a place where we could salvage around 50% of attribution data.
The self congratulating I saw was
* they decided to try this before it was foisted on them by externalities.
* they worked their asses off to make it work.
* they have a competent BI team.
I don't understand why they also eliminated most first party cookies though. I respect that level of respect for user privacy but it goes beyond my personal expectation for privacy.
That’s why chat GPT is to produce marketing copy that is as good or better than the best ad people can do.
"We at [...] understand that being able to accurately manage [...] while fielding is essential to a successful project."
The entire text was two more sentences and a video. That's just taking the piss. Just say "watch the damn vid." if you really want to add text.