2023-06-01 | Article | Insights
As the digital advertising world continues to move towards a cookieless future, marketers need to explore new targeting options to keep up with the changes. Display & Video 360 (DV360) offers a range of features to target users without relying on cookies. In this post, we'll explore the various cookieless strategies offered by DV360, how brands can use first-party data to reach their desired audience, and the importance of adopting these strategies to stay relevant in the cookieless world.
DV360 offers several features for targeting users without cookies. Contextual targeting is one such feature that helps advertisers show their ads on web pages relevant to the topic of the ad. Location targeting is another useful feature that allows businesses to target customers in a specific geographic location, such as a local restaurant or retail store. Additionally, device targeting helps optimize ads for different devices and improves their effectiveness. Although these capabilities have been around since the early days of targeting, they prove to be more relevant than ever during this cookieless era.
With Customer Match targeting, it is possible to reach new users by targeting similar audiences based on those users that are most valuable. Advertisers can use the customer match option to create similar custom audiences in DV360 based on existing customer database information that is handled in a privacy-first method. With the customer list, reaching new users can be done across Display and Video inventory in Google Ad Manager, YouTube, and Gmail in DV360. Customer match in combination with Google audiences can provide the extra reach needed.
Another option is to create optimized audiences, which use real-time data from a campaign to find new audiences more likely to convert. With optimized targeting, advertisers can use various targeting signals, including first-party, third-party, and Google audiences, to guide the feature's search for new audiences.
As Google is phasing out third-party cookies from 2024, advertisers must find new ways of accessing audience data and innovative ways of targeting them. Recently announced, the Publisher Advertiser Identity Reconciliation (PAIR) is a strategy that allows brands to cross-match the databases between advertisers and ad platforms, enabling personalized, hyper-targeted ads on websites where people have given permission to access their details. By using PAIR, advertisers can reach high-intent audiences and increase the chances of conversion while keeping consumer data safe. A solution to activate this would be clean rooms. Clean rooms are used to connect the data, ensuring any data shared by advertisers and publishers stays secure, and only their encrypted data gets shared with Display & Video 360 for reconciliation.
As the cookieless world continues to develop, it is vital for brands to adopt cookieless strategies such as those offered by DV360. By utilizing first-party data and targeting strategies, brands can make the most of these features and improve the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns. PAIR and other solutions like Google Analytics 4 and Google's Privacy Sandbox are essential for brands to tap into first-party data while reducing reliance on third-party data and ensuring a privacy-first solution. By staying up-to-date with cookieless strategies, brands can continue to reach their desired audience while keeping their audience data safe.