Cookieless Advertising for Financial Services Marketers

Heading into 2025, financial services marketers face an unenviable list of challenges—from convincing people to borrow money at today’s high rates, to communicating product value and service expertise in an ultra-competitive market, to reaching and converting unbanked, underbanked, or alternative-banking customers.

Signal loss isn’t making things any easier, as Google’s plans to offer consumers an “informed choice” experience for third-party cookies in Chrome will ultimately pose the same challenges marketers expected with cookie deprecation.

But the financial services industry has proven resilient in the face of change. It’s better positioned for greater regulatory scrutiny. First-party consumer data is available, attainable, and actionable. And solutions abound for targeting and retargeting potential new customers and attributing their conversions—including inquiries, online applications, scheduled appointments, and more—to advertising campaigns.

To help financial services advertisers adapt to signal loss, we spoke to Julia Hewitt, Basis GVP of Integrated Client Solutions, to gather her top recommendations and insights.

What are the top considerations for financial services advertisers when it comes to dealing with signal loss?

Julia Hewitt: Financial services advertisers will need to consider how they’re reaching their audience online, which looks different today than it did five years ago thanks to cookie loss, digital advertising regulations, mobile ID erosion, and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency. Whether it’s through targeted advertising, organic content, or community sponsorships, financial services marketers need to cut through the noise to reach their ideal prospects at key moments of intent.

Then, once you reach them, you need to consider what you are doing to help them connect with your brand and, ultimately, entice them to provide you with some form of first-party data: If people are clicking on your ad or going to your website, what content are you providing? Do you have tools they can use—let’s say, to calculate the cost of a loan? Or to run comparisons with other financial services? Do you have a newsletter they can sign up for that includes information that’s highly relevant to them and their needs? These are the sorts of things that could generate an inquiry or an opt-in that gives you the data you need for targeting, personalization, and attribution.

Of course, the challenges that come from signal loss will affect reach and personalization. There are regulations that require you to comply with how you’re targeting people and how transparent you are with how you plan to use their data—we’ve seen it with programmatic advertising, we’ve seen it with Meta, and we’ve seen it with Google. As cookies and the ability to track app data fall by the wayside, timing and relevance get more difficult. But the good news is that, as an industry, we’re used to change. We’re used to adapting. This is just another wave to get through.

What cookieless solutions are particularly useful for financial services advertisers?

JH: Contextual targeting is a great approach for financial services marketers and brands to lean into. When people are researching homes and home loans, cars and auto loans, home or auto insurance, or credit card rates, they’re researching because they intend to buy, borrow, or inquire. Advertising next to this content can strengthen awareness or trigger a decision to click and engage with these financial services companies. A big thing with contextual advertising is identifying the content, keywords, publishers, and/or private marketplaces that will connect your brand with moments that are important to your potential customers.

And, of course, using first-party data is key. But to be able to use it, you first have to collect it. A company website can offer lots of places for that data collection, including inquiries, appointment schedulers, content downloads, or e-newsletter signups. The right martech can then help segment that data to apply it strategically so you’re not advertising retirement planning ads to 18-year-olds heading off to college.

When collecting first-party data, it’s critical to keep regulations and customer expectations around data privacy top-of-mind. Inform users about how you’ll use their data, and make sure they have access to your data usage policies to be compliant.

Finally, we can’t forget attribution, which will continue to evolve as we continue to lose signals. Google Analytics or other web analytics dashboards can help, and there are several other attribution solutions in the works (including from Google) that will replace the “cookie trail” from ad exposure through event-level metrics to conversion. Media mix modeling solutions can also help advertisers evaluate a holistic picture of the customer journey. There is no one-size-fits all approach, but relying on data to influence your digital marketing strategy can allow advertisers to be more efficient and effective.

Could you provide some specific examples for how financial services advertisers might put these recommendations into effect?

JH: Imagine a financial advisory brokerage that needs more financial advisors on staff, so they might decide to advertise to recruit a highly qualified person to provide that specific type of service. They’ll want to set up their adtech stack to be able to measure and analyze click-through data from their digital advertising campaigns with tactics like granular ad tags instead of cookies, then determine the best-performing websites for ad placements and strengthen those partnerships.

A similar process could be applied in B2C marketing as well. Marketers could measure clicks on ads to identify high-performing placements and personas. Then, using machine learning and predictive modeling, they could locate those personas and others with similar traits, targeting products or services that align with their preferences.

There are also opportunities to use your website to identify specific audience behaviors and feed that information into a CRM for better segmentation. For example, web visitors might submit their email addresses when downloading an online guide to home-buying or to follow up on the results from an auto loan calculator. That can create first-party data sets that pull in more personal data. That category-level information can also enrich a person’s CRM record with zero-party or interest-level data, which can then be used for a more personalized, relevant ad experience.

Wrapping Up: Cookieless Advertising for Financial Services Marketers

While signal loss presents challenges for finserv marketing teams, implementing these recommendations now will help them gain a competitive edge against teams who aren’t as proactive. By collecting first-party data intentionally, strategically investing in contextual targeting, and leveraging data analysis for segmentation and optimization, finserv advertisers can achieve targeting and message resonance at rates that would make the Fed jealous.

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Mounting signal loss isn’t the only trend set to shape digital advertising in 2025: The shifting landscape of online search, the maturation of CTV advertising, evolving sentiments around AI, and the rise of commerce media will also change how brands engage with consumers, allocate budgets, and measure success. Check out Reality Check: The 2025 Advertising Trends Report to learn more.