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The story of signal loss in digital advertising has been a long and winding one, with several plot twists (we’re looking at you, Google). In the wake of the search giant’s monopolist’s latest announcement that it will not, in fact, deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome—instead planning to provide users with an “informed choice” experience—now is likely a particularly confusing time for many brands as they strive to understand the landscape of signal loss and what it means for their campaigns.
As most media agencies likely understand, signal loss will continue to increase despite Google’s U-turn, as a majority of Chrome users are expected to opt-out of a cookied browser experience. And, of course, these forthcoming changes aren’t the only source of signal loss: Digital advertisers have already lost targeting and tracking capabilities for Firefox and Safari users, faced further losses as a result of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency, and contended with a wave of privacy-minded digital advertising regulation.
As the advertising industry moves towards a more privacy-first model, it is critical for media agencies to coach and educate their clients to set them up for success. Maintaining proactive and transparent communication, working to optimize clients’ systems for collecting and executing on first-party data, and helping them adjust to new systems for cookieless measurement should be key aspects of any media agency’s plans.
When educating clients about signal loss, agency teams should prioritize proactive, transparent communication. In maintaining as much transparency as possible around how their team plans to address signal loss, agencies can ensure that clients maintain their desired levels of understanding and control over their media buys. And by communicating proactively about changes that will impact clients’ ability to target and measure their campaigns, agencies can ensure their clients aren’t caught off guard when more signals are lost and begin to impact performance.
Lauren Johnson, Client Strategy and Effectiveness Lead at Basis Technologies, says that specificity should be a key aspect of these conversations. “The more precise we can get with how specific aspects of signal loss impact a specific client in their specific campaign,” Johnson says, “the more successful we’ll be in evolving the ways that our clients think so that they’ll be set up for success.”
Johnson recommends that agency leaders ensure their team members are prepared to come to each client and say, “These are the exact ways in which we’ve lost and are losing signals. Here’s exactly how that signal loss is impacting targeting and measurement in this specific buy. And here are the new approaches we’d like to test for targeting and measuring this campaign.’”
To provide this type of communication consistently across an agency’s clients, leaders can create a signal loss POV—a document that lays out the agency’s stance on and approach to signal loss—and share it out with their team. This helps to ensure that everyone, including more junior-level employees, can speak effectively to an agency’s signal loss plan.
Strong communication (or even overcommunication) and re-iteration of this information will be key to effectively educating clients over time. In keeping brands fully informed, agencies can build trust with clients and support client retention during a particularly tumultuous time for both agency-client relations and the advertising industry as a whole.
As advertisers know well, first-party data is currently the best replacement for third-party data: Not only is it privacy-friendly, but it also provides a high degree of precision in understanding an audience. As such, helping clients better collect, unify, organize, and execute on their first-party data must continue to be a top priority for media agencies.
“Often, the biggest struggles for brands when it comes to first-party data are (1) the ability to scale it for activation, and (2) understanding the value it brings to other aspects of campaign planning,” says Kelly Boyle, Group VP of Client Strategy and Insights at Basis Technologies.
Agencies are well positioned to help their clients address these problems—for example, by proposing a media plan with an objective of collecting first-party data. The best approaches here will vary by industry: A restaurant brand, for instance, might focus on collecting first-party data via loyalty programs and reservation systems, whereas a B2B brand might focus on collecting it by encouraging prospects to fill out a form to access a piece of relevant content, such as a report or whitepaper.
Agencies can also support their clients with the critical task of unifying their first-party data. This means taking stock of the various places where a clients’ first-party data is stored—many brands’ first-party data is spread across a variety of different platforms and third-party vendors—and educating them about how solutions like CRMs and CDPs can help to centralize, standardize, and execute on that data. For example, agencies could use a CDP storing a brand’s first-party data to gain a view of their consumers’ buying journey and better understand what tactics and touchpoints are most effective at leading to conversions. Then, in the planning stage, they can heavy-up spending on those tactics and touchpoints to increase conversions.
Boyle notes that first-party data can also help to inform campaign planning, which is growing increasingly important as advertisers lose signals. “Signal loss increases the importance of strategy, planning, and upfront research,” says Boyle. “If we’re less able to go after our audience based on cookies and other lost signals, then we must have a better understanding of the client’s core audience—what they care about, how they behave, etc.—in the planning stage, and use that to inform our campaigns.”
When unified and organized properly, first-party data can provide advertisers with valuable consumer information that they can use in the planning stage to craft more strategic campaigns.
Finally, media agencies must help their clients transition away from the current status quo of third-party cookie-based measurement and attribution solutions. A big part of this task will be resetting expectations with those proactive, transparent communications plans: Clients are used to being able to easily pull detailed, cookie-based reports, but as signal loss intensifies, the ways advertisers measure their campaigns will look significantly different.
In addition to setting new expectations around measurement, agencies must help their clients adjust to a new, more privacy-friendly measurement stack. This means aligning all the different data sources that can help tell a client’s business story amidst signal loss, such as the client’s sales data, first-party data, brand lift studies, cookieless multi-touch attribution tools, and any other kinds of measurement tools or partners that a client or agency has access to. Of course, agencies can continue to place third-party pixels for clients where they can, but as signal loss increases, that pixel data won’t be able to tell a holistic story about what a brand’s campaign investment is doing for them. As such, advertisers should complement pixel data with other, cookieless measurement solutions, and proactively communicate to their clients about what these solutions offer.
What alternative measurement approaches might media agencies want to explore with their clients? For one, marketing mix modeling (MMM) is making a resurgence. While MMMs used to be major undertakings that could often only be done on an annual basis, there are many new players in the space offering solutions that are more turnkey. Going into 2024, more than half of US brands and agencies reported that they would be somewhat or significantly more focused on MMM this year.
Attention metrics are another KPI that forward-looking marketers are integrating into their measurement approaches. “Research shows that attention drives brand outcomes,” says Boyle. “Understanding the strengths of media placements in capturing attention and measuring that impact on short- and long-term metrics gives marketers another lever to guide marketing decisions.” Given the benefits they offer, it makes sense that just under half of US brands and agencies say they will be somewhat or significantly more focused on attention metrics in 2024.
Lastly, agencies should make ongoing testing a core competency. This means proactively building thoughtful learning agendas that help prioritize key areas where testing supports both client and agency curiosities about performance, as well as designing appropriate experiments that support those learning goals. “At Basis, we aim to group our tests around learning topics that range from audience to attention,” says Johnson. “With these foundations in place, we prioritize channel-specific tests for audience learnings, creative findings, ad quality, and so on. Testing is powerful tool for agencies to arm their clients with critical data points for how their media investment supports their business.”
It is especially important to begin testing now (if you haven’t already), as advertisers will have fewer and fewer signals to test with moving forward. Johnson recommends that advertising teams ask themselves, “How can we implement testing to understand incrementality now, so that when we lose even more signals, we can expect that incrementality is happening—because we’ve tested and proven it—even if we don't see it in our key metrics from our ad server?”
Overall, the onus is on agencies to bring those new measurement solutions to their clients and to begin testing and learning with them as soon as possible. Marketers can approach these conversations by asking their clients, “Have you thought about [X measurement solution]?” or by telling them that they have a new solution they’d like to explore on the client’s behalf. Agencies must also strengthen their own cookieless measurement stacks so that they can provide the best and most holistic approaches possible as signal loss increases.
With many signals already lost and more to come once Google makes its planned changes in Chrome, the time for agencies to set new expectations and help prepare their clients for increased signal loss is now.
As privacy regulations tighten and cookie-based data dwindles, agencies that prioritize proactive and transparent client communication and education, and coach their clients on how to optimize their first-party data and measurement stacks for a world with significantly fewer cookie-based signals, will be best prepared for what lies ahead. It is a critical time for agencies to serve as strategic advisors to their clients—and those who do it right will see the added benefit of increased client trust and retention.
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Of course, signal loss isn’t the only challenge facing media agencies: Financial pressures, media fragmentation, and inefficient processes are just a few of the other factors pushing agencies to evolve. To learn more about how marketing professionals from agencies across the US feel about the problems and opportunities shaping their present and their future, check out our 2024 Advertising Agency Report.