Your cookies are crumbling; and for once, that’s a good thing.

It wasn’t that long ago that many consumers didn’t even understand what cookies were or why they should care. Of course, these days, everyone knows about cookies—just in time to watch their demise at the hands of new government regulation and consumers’ own behaviors.

Mobile Cookie Crusher

Research continues to see an increase in mobile browsing in recent years, peaking at 52.2 percent of total worldwide browsing in 2018. This trend is one of the biggest factors affecting cookies as a campaign tracking tool.

On mobile devices, where unique device IDs tell websites who’s visiting, there’s less need for invasive cookies that surreptitiously track user behaviors—the phone provides all the goods. From a marketing attribution standpoint, this is great news. Cookies were a workaround solution for tracking user behavior across traditional browsing channels, but thanks to mobile, companies have access to more attribution tools than ever before.

It’s no coincidence that the rise of mobile browsing is aligned with an increase in privacy concerns. With our mobile devices, we’re giving applications more data than ever before—GPS locations, address book info, device storage, and more. And while these features open up some great marketing strategies, such as GPS proximity marketing that ties a business’s digital presence with its brick-and-mortar store, this data ubiquity presents some challenges too.

Amidst privacy concerns, governments across the globe are taking a stand on how companies leverage user data, with the biggest targets being the cookies themselves.

Cookies Are Personal Data

The use of cookies is already governed by particular rules. But the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), set to go into effect on May 25^th 2018, is pushing this even further by clearly delineating the role of cookies as personal data. Does this mean cookies are done for? It may take some time, but we see this as the inevitable outcome. The mobile eclipse will continue to push desktop-centric attribution tools to the background in favor of newer solutions. And for marketers plugged in to the latest mobile marketing solutions, this can only be a good thing.

It’s no secret that eCommerce has seen some great advancements over the past few years, particularly with the proliferation of digital marketing. But so far, companies have struggled to bridge the gap between their online and offline marketing campaigns in terms of understanding which strategies actually drive sales.

It’s estimated 90 percent of retail sales still happen in brick-and-mortar stores, but with so many digital marketing components at play for the average business, how much of this profit is attributable to online marketing spend?

Advancements in Campaign Tracking

This concept is called offline attribution—understanding which online marketing channels drive the bulk of offline sales. To meet these goals, companies are advancing the way we look at digital marketing and are more tightly integrating their current assets to find these insights:

• Sophisticated paid search campaign studies are increasing, each of which provide data to better define connections between offline and online channels;
• Per Google, offline attribution is possible through the use of mobile location tracking data tied to search queries, a new metric called Store Visit Conversions;
• The increasing use of My Business listings for local businesses and other web-based snippets that let users directly attribute traffic to specific website components.

But companies like Google are taking things even further. The company is leveraging its considerable mapping tools and geographic tracking technology to better define in-store locations. This means that Google will have more insight than ever into the physical locations of each business to complement its arsenal of user-submitted search data—the perfect recipe for offline attribution.

As time goes on, we expect more companies to begin tracking these metrics and leveraging these strategies to learn what’s truly driving their sales.