Crumbs! Part 3 – The Future of Measurement

Welcome back to the final instalment of our Crumbs! series. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been looking at the cookieless future and how marketers can best prepare themselves for what’s to come. In the previous two articles, we’ve covered data collection and audience targeting, and now turn our attention to reporting and measurement and how cookieless alternatives could fit together to support full-funnel measurement in 2025, and beyond.

The Murky Waters of Digital Measurement

Cross-domain tracking, using readily available and highly proliferated 3rd party cookies has been the backbone of centralised reach and frequency measurement and multi-touch attribution for decades, but this set to come to an end with the redaction of 3rd party cookies later this year.

It’s worth noting that a large percentage of media currently traded on Safari, Firefox and across other non-cookie enabled environments to have faced these challenges for several years, and that changing regulatory and consent requirements have also had a significant impact on our ability to track, measure and report on media campaign performance. In short, cross-domain measurement has always been tricky, and these aren’t entirely new problems we’re looking to solve.

A Marketer’s Measurement Toolbox

When we look at the measurement landscape, it’s worth noting that we have a range of existing capabilities to call upon, which all individually mitigate the loss of the cookie, and together, could provide a powerfully holistic remedy. So, what tools do we have in the post-cookie measurement toolbox:

1. Incrementality Analysis – Incrementality analysis or “lift studies” requires us to create strict test and control conditions. Incrementality attempts to hold as many variables as possible constant so we can measure more concretely the impact of our advertising on brand perception, purchase consideration, or other performance metrics. For instance, running media activity in one location and not another comparable location, or showing digital advertising to one group and not another comparable group.
2. Media Mix Modelling (MMM) – MMM and time series analysis utilise long-established econometric practices to assess correlation and infer causality between media investment and a given business KPI, whilst accounting for other independent variables such as seasonality, pricing and share of market.
3. Media Clean Rooms – Media Clean Rooms allow us to aggregate digital performance data within or across an advertising environment, for instance Google’s Marketing Suite, Amazon Advertising Platforms, or the Meta ecosystem. Through media clean rooms we can conduct deep-dive analysis through a series of pre-vetted queries and aggregated and anonymised insights
4. API-Driven Reporting – Site-centric reporting, given the appropriate consent is provided, will be sustainable post-cookie deprecation. Meaning that post-click attribution as it appears within analytics tools, will be largely unaffected by 3rd party cookie removal. However, there is still a need to deliver this conversion information to the ad delivery platform, so campaigns can be optimised accordingly. Solutions such as Meta Conversion API (CAPI), Google’s Enhanced Conversion API, and Apple’s SKAdNetwork, offer a window into the future of campaign measurement and in-platform reporting, utilising APIs to post-back conversion data to the ad delivery platform, without the use of cookies.

Pieces of the Measurement Puzzle

The above list of potential solutions, and there are likely many more not mentioned above, all offer some glimpse into how measurement might be delivered in a post-cookie world. But what is becoming increasingly clear, is the need to deliver hybrid measurement solutions that stitch together different techniques to create something more holistic and integrated through the entire funnel.

There are many ways to think about the integration of different measurement techniques, but I prefer to focus on the optimal application of the tools for the purpose of answering specific questions or providing insight to help guide specific decisions through the lifetime of a campaign. This can be illustrated generally using the structure below:

From the diagram above. we can see how a multi-layered approach to full-funnel measurement may emerge in a post-cookie world, with different techniques and methods being applied to answer different questions related to (1) in-flight conversion optimisation, where last-click attribution and API-enabled platform reporting will play a big role, (2) post-campaign analysis, where media clean rooms and incrementality can be used to dig deeper into channel performance, and (3) longer-term media impact and response analysis conducted through econometrics and MMM, much as it is today.

Increasingly, we’re seeing brands going one step further to integrate insights across these different measurement instruments, for instance weighting last-click attribution scores, using insights gleaned from MMM and / or incrementality, or utilising incrementality analysis and brand lift studies outputs, nested within MMM to pull apart brand and performance drivers more effectively.

Connected measurement has always felt like both an art and a science. Perhaps going forwards the art will be in how the science is connected and integrated together to provide a coherent and logically consistent rationalisation of performance through the funnel. What is clear is that this is going to be a very interesting and exciting time for those people tasked with helping brands understand the value of media in driving business metrics.