How Explore Georgia Finds Intrepid Travelers Without Using Cookies

When the pandemic upended the travel industry, finding the right people to target with advertising became more important than ever for Explore Georgia, the tourism wing of the state’s Department of Economic Development. The stakes were particularly high—given that it used 2020 to expand its media plan beyond its single annual campaign in traditional media channels, to being more digitally led and continual. “With a more conservative budget we wanted to find people who were actively searching for travel information,” said Meggan Hood, Explore Georgia division director. “[Previously], it was more permissible catching and pitching.” As traveling began to rebound in 2022—and competition to refill state tourism coffers grew—Explore Georgia, still relatively new to digital marketing, took a bit of a risk: run targeted ads without cookies. At a time when 81% of companies are still substantially dependent on cookies—despite the two-year horizon for their deprecation—Explore Georgia ran tests with Sort, a predictive cookieless solution from ad-tech business Undertone, a division of Perion Network. All cookieless solutions face an uphill battle toward mass adoption, especially in 2022, given the crowded landscape and many marketers’ reluctance to try new solutions. And while publishers have built up first-party data stores, ad buyers need solutions outside those environments. For Explore Georgia, it is at least seeing success when comparing alternatives to third-party cookies. For page grabber ads, a format that involves more immersive page takeover ads, targeting via Sort led to 41% higher click-through rate than via third-party cookies and 51% higher than contextual targeting. For a bottom-of-the-page ad format called bottom adhesion, targeting via Sort outperformed CTR for third-party cookies by 11% and contextual by 71%. The ads led travelers to Explore Georgia’s website during the campaign duration, which was January through July 2022. Having now recognized the power of digital marketing, Hood said it is important for Explore Georgia to continue to innovate, including through cookie replacements. “We’re staying on the leading edge of these paid media solutions because we know how important digital is to our media mix,” Hood said. “The travel marketplace is extraordinarily competitive.” DailyMail.com Grows Revenue From Cookieless Inventory Sort finds patterns in non-identifying information Sort works by creating clusters of non-identifying characteristics that can be gleaned when a user visits a web page, like the time of day they’re visiting on, the kind of device, what the weather is that day and context from the webpage itself. Undertone creates groups with these signals that correspond to affinities for different kinds of advertising. People are sorted into these groups in real time, meaning that the same user can be classified into different groups during different web browsing sessions. “If you’re in [one group], we know whether to serve you an ad,” said Kimberly Leone, svp of marketing and strategic services at Undertone. For example, a group defined by one cluster of signals might be known to love travel ads and be receptive to clicking on them, she added. Leone noted that the number of advertisers using the Sort solution nearly doubled between the second quarter and first quarter of 2022. The solution works by using signals to assess the value of an impression before an advertiser buys it, said Rudy Grahn, who leads the attribution and measurement practice for programmatic consultancy Prohaska Consulting. Sort can be categorized as a predictive or an AI solution, similar to cookieless replacements offered by Dstillery, AdTheorant and ChaliceAI, he added. “The success of those predictions is how many other [companies] are using the same stuff. If everyone is using the same math and the same information … it ends up being not that great,” Grahn said. “They need to distinguish themselves with the data ingredients that go into these clusters.” Explore Georgia provides preliminary evidence that Sort could have an edge on third-party cookies themselves, especially given that traditional cookies rely on historical instead of real-time information, said Undertone president Dan Aks. “I don’t believe you can and should reduce people to a historical database,” Aks said, noting someone could be in one instance browsing the Internet as a mom and another as someone looking to go out with friends. “Cookies try to classify you in some pigeonhole.”