In many ways, the cookie has fueled the internet’s evolution over the past two decades and given rise to some reliable, successful B2B marketing strategies. While we’re beginning to see alternative solutions emerge, the following cookie-based tactics are already facing tough challenges:

Remarketing and behavioral targeting

This has been the bread and butter of digital marketing. Without third-party cookies, marketers will lose the ability to build cookie-based audiences. They’ll no longer be able to serve ads across the internet to users who have visited their websites or serve ads based on someone’s browsing behavior.

Account-based marketing

Marketers have relied on the third-party cookies to support their account-based marketing strategies so they can target very specific attributes within a group of prospective customers. Without cookies, narrowing that audience to a specific persona based on demographic or firmographic targeting has become more challenging.

Programmatic advertising

As advertisers pressured their technology partners for high-quality scale, ad tech companies delivered programmatic advertising. This method relies on third-party cookies to collect anonymized user data, segment audiences and serve personalized, targeted content at scale. When the browser blocks cookies, this highly lucrative and popular strategy will no longer work. Adtech companies that have built demand-side platforms (DSPs) or data management platforms (DMPs) will be most affected by this change. DMPs rely on cookies to collect anonymized user data and segment audiences. Publishers may also suffer because they will lose the ability to find and scale those audiences.

Attribution

Marketers constantly debate which touchpoint attribution model (i.e. first click, last click, etc.) can take credit for generating revenue. Those discussions will subside without a third-party cookie to track view-through conversions and activity across multiple digital touchpoints.