3 opportunities for travel marketers now that cookies are here to stay

The cookie jar is full again… and it’s not just the cookie monster who should be celebrating.

A browser cookie is a small string of code enabling advertisers to deliver highly targeted ads and track Internet users across multiple websites. While these cookies are incredibly effective user targeting tools for advertisers, privacy advocates and regulators have continued to push for their replacement with technology that prevents advertisers and publishers from identifying individual users and their online behavior. 

In January 2020, as part of a general push towards increased user privacy, Google announced a bold, two-year roadmap to remove support for third-party cookies in Google Chrome - the most widely-adopted web browser by a significant margin. 

The move immediately raised concerns with advertisers, including the 40+ travel companies we work with, who rely heavily on cookies to deliver targeted, timely advertising messaging across the web - and the publishers who are compensated for delivering those ads on their websites. It is for this reason (and cited regulatory concerns) Google continued to delay the rollout of third-party cookie restrictions.

Those delays extended all the way until July 22, 2024, when Google unexpectedly announced their plans to sunset third-party cookies had gone the way of the dodo. 

When asked about the decision Tuesday night during a call with analysts about Google parent Alphabet’s second quarter financial results, CEO Sundar Pichai said, “… on third-party cookies, given the implications across the ecosystems and considerations and feedback across so many stakeholders, we now believe user choice is the best path forward there. And we'll both improve privacy by giving users choice, and we'll continue our investments in privacy-enhancing technologies.”

My take? I suspect, following Google’s test of the deprecation on nearly 30 million Google Chrome users, it became clear to Google that the impact on their P&L would be far too significant to bear in a time when the company’s market dominance in research and discovery is already being challenged by AI alternatives like ChatGPT and Perplexity AI. 

Simply put: Google likely forecasted advertisers would spend less on Google if their ads were less effective. 

The most interesting takeaway: travel marketers no longer need to radically reinvent their advertising strategies to remain competitive in the market. Particularly in the US, where regulators have been more lenient and advertisers are most equipped to take advantage of third-party cookies, we foresee three key opportunities for travel marketers:

• Targeting users based on their stage of traveler intent. Travel marketers who have built strong content engines and integrated their marketing channels will come out on top. 
  
  The travel research journey is an elongated process. Expedia found in 2023 in the 45 days leading up to a booking, U.S. travelers view as many as 277 pages of content prior to making a booking. That’s 277 high-intent touchpoints that can be used to identify a traveler’s interest so advertisers can retarget them as they proceed through their booking journey. Travel marketers should be building audiences of visitors to their top- and middle-of-funnel content to retarget those travelers with highly relevant ads. 
• Ad fatigue reduction. One of the most challenging complications of cookie depreciation is limiting ad frequency - that is: how many times a specific ad is shown to a specific user in their web experience. [--newsletter id='1'--If the same ad is shown to a traveler too many times, they’ll likely experience ad fatigue, which, at scale, can crush campaign performance. Cookies enable ad platforms to precisely count the number of times a specific ad has been shown to a user, giving advertisers tools to limit ad delivery and retain consumer trust. 
• Decreasing reliance on first-party data. One of the most concerning outcomes of sunsetting cookies would have been the need to replace third-party data with first-party data (emails, phone numbers, and other voluntarily-provided user identifiers) - which is much more difficult to collect.
  
  Take, for example, abandoned cart campaigns: Let’s say a traveler looks to book a multi-day tour on your website, but doesn’t complete the checkout flow. Without third-party cookies, if you don’t collect their email, it becomes virtually impossible to reach and target that specific traveler on other websites.
  
  With third-party cookies remaining a viable option, marketers can build an audience of non-converting users and target them with discounts and tailored offers to encourage them to return to your platform to complete their booking. 

Even though third-party cookies have been available for decades, our team talks to established and well-recognized travel companies every week that are failing to leverage the data available to them with third-party cookies. While we do expect third-party audiences to become increasingly difficult to track as additional regulations (like CCPA) come into play - in favor of consumer privacy - our media team doesn’t expect to see a single switch take that power from advertisers overnight now that Google will be continuing support for third-party cookies.

Our recommendation is to continue building your first-party datasets, as regulations will continue to squeeze out the effectiveness of third-party cookies. Nothing is on fire today, and first-party data collection does not need to be at the top of your priorities list, but it will help you in the long run.

Instead of making your primary focus first-party data collection, we recommend several key focus areas. 

• First, continue to build cross-channel campaigns. You have valuable data at your fingerprints when you’re running multi-channel (SEO, paid media, CTV, etc.) campaigns and make sure your departments are talking to each other.
• Second, reduce your dependence on individual marketing channels - companies quickly become far too reliant on a single channel that works well.
• Third, leverage your first and third-party datasets to build audiences and make stronger marketing decisions.
• Finally, make sure you’re targeting travelers at each stage of the travel research journey with appropriate messaging.

Travel marketers: time for you to get the best night sleep you’ve had in four years.