Cookieless Attribution

How the cookieless world affects attribution marketing

Can attribution marketing exist in a cookieless tracking system?

Yes, of course it can. There are Cookieless Web Analytics tools that can create attribution models.

A customer journey analysis system can be used to perform attribution calculations based on a cookieless system, such as a digital fingerprinting-based system.

In other words, to analyze the attribution of our marketing campaigns we need to measure the customer journey.

To measure the customer journey, we currently use technologies such as cookies.

But can we measure customer journeys without cookies?

Yes, there are other technologies such as local storage, digital fingerprinting, which create a user-id. Once we have this user-id, we assign to it all the browsing that is being done: pages viewed, items added to cart… When this user-id performs the conversion; the attribution is calculated.

Is cookieless technology attribution marketing compliant with GDPR?

Yes, it complies with the regulation as long as the users’ data is “anonymized” or they have given us their consent to work with it.

That is, as long as the user converts on our website, and we process their data according to the consent they have given; or by “anonymizing” the personal data.

Is cookieless technology attribution marketing compliant with ePrivacy?

No, it does not, it requires user consent. One of the big differences between GDPR and ePrivacy is that GDPR is about “anonymizing” our users and ePrivacy is about not being able to individually measure a user without their consent.

Therefore, any user who does NOT agree to be individually measured cannot have attribution calculated, whether it is based on cookie technology or any cookieless technology, whichever it is.

Conclusion on how the cookieless world will affect attribution marketing:

It’s not an issue whether cookies will affect attribution models; the issue is that to measure attribution we need user consent, whether with cookies or without them; it’s not a cookie issue, it’s a privacy issue.

Will privacy affect attribution? Of course it will, we will only be able to measure attribution for those who accept cookies.

How many accept cookies? According to our data, between 35% to 65% of a website’s traffic.