How do you measure the success of a campaign if no one clicks? In the new cookieless era, the answer is not only possible but essential.

Clickless advertising has gone from being a rarity to a priority for brands focused on brand recognition, mass reach, and effectiveness in environments where the click simply doesn’t exist. With the rise of channels like YouTube on Smart TVs, DOOH, digital audio, and CTV, it is time to move beyond models based solely on direct interaction.

In this post, we tell you what clickless advertising is, why it matters in 2025, and how you can measure it effectively with Google Marketing Platform (GMP) to demonstrate real results in campaigns where visual impact is worth more than the click.

What is Clickless Advertising and Why is It Gaining Ground?

Clickless advertising encompasses campaigns where the goal is not for the user to click, but for them to remember, recognize, and interact with the brand later on. This type of impact is generated in environments where direct interaction is not possible (or does not make sense):

• YouTube on Connected TV
• Spotify, podcasts, or programmatic audio
• DOOH (Digital Out Of Home), such as digital billboards or screens in shopping centers
• CTV (Connected TV)

With the progressive phasing out of third-party cookies and the increase in media consumption without a browser, measuring without clicks is no longer an option—it is a necessity.

According to Nielsen, 65% of offline sales are influenced by advertising without direct interaction.

GMP: Your Ally for Measuring What Cannot Be Clicked

The key is to adopt new measurement tools and methods based on aggregated data, modeling, and first-party data. This is where Google Marketing Platform shines as a comprehensive solution:

🎯 Campaign Manager 360: Measuring Impressions and Viewability CM360 allows you to track impressions, viewability, frequency, and cross-channel reach. It is the central hub for validating that your message has reached the right audience.

🧠 Google Analytics 4: Behavior After Exposure Even without clicks, GA4 helps analyze user behavior after viewing an ad: direct traffic, brand searches, completed forms, etc. Thanks to its advanced attribution models, it compensates for the lack of cookies and protects privacy.

🔗 Integrated Platform: GMP as an Ecosystem The combination of CM360 + GA4 + DV360 + SA360 allows for a holistic view of campaign performance, uniting awareness and performance metrics under one umbrella.

Strategies That Work (Even if No One Clicks)

🧪 Brand Lift and Brand Awareness Use studies like YouTube Brand Lift or post-exposure surveys to measure ad recall, consideration, or purchase intent.

🗺️ Geo-testing and Incrementality Compare exposed and unexposed regions with tools like GeoLift to evaluate the real impact on searches or sales.

👤 First-Party Data and Indirect Signals Analyze direct traffic, brand searches, and completed forms after exposure. Supplement with user panels or surveys.

🔒 Consent Mode v2 and Conversion Modeling Even without cookies, you can estimate conversions with modeling and platforms like Ads Data Hub, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.

Real-Life Cases That Prove It

• YouTube on CTV: Campaigns with a +20% brand recall, without clicks or calls to action.
• Spotify Ads: Direct correlation between full ad listens and peaks in brand searches.
• DOOH in shopping centers: Increase in store visits (footfall) and geolocated sales following campaigns without digital interaction.

Conclusion: Measuring Without Clicks Is Not Only Possible, It Is Essential

In a cookieless world with increasingly dispersed consumers, clickless advertising represents the natural evolution of digital marketing. It is no longer just about chasing interactions, but about understanding the real impact of the message on the user’s mind and decisions.

GMP gives you the tools to do this with precision, respect for privacy, and an omnichannel approach.

And you, are you ready to measure without relying on the click? If you want to know how to implement this type of measurement in your strategy, let’s talk. Because the future of marketing is not measured in clicks, but in connections.

With Google’s impending deprecation of third party cookies later this year and the industry’s continued emphasis on user privacy, tried and true programmatic advertising norms and practices of the past will cease to exist. At Making Science, we believe this change gives us an opportunity to rethink our existing ways of working, and support our clients as they navigate this changing environment.

We’re shifting from one-to-one precision targeting, to focusing on first-party data. From deterministic measurement, to a future powered by modeled measurement. From data processing within AdTech product platforms, to on-device data processing. These changes also inevitably mean changes to AdTech product platforms, such as Campaign Manager 360.

Campaign Manager 360 Reporting and Attribution Recommendations

Without third party cookies, cross-site and cross-device tracking will look quite different. Luckily, due to modeling, reporting will still be possible but many existing CM360 reporting and attribution features will need to be removed and/or adjusted accordingly. 

For instance, the Attribution Modeling Tool will be significantly impacted. Data-driven attribution (DDA) will be limited, but it will still be a possible attribution model. We recommend using either DDA or Floodlight attribution models. For now, these will likely be the only attribution models available to compare via the Attribution Modeling Tool post 3PCD.

Check out this update from Google for a specific list of reports and metrics being impacted. Sign up for the Making Science Google Marketing Platform Newsletter to stay up to date on the latest product news!

Actions to Take in Preparation for 3PCD

Advancements in privacy-safe advertising techniques and these product updates mean there are some important actions for advertisers to take to update and maintain reporting capabilities.

Google recommends advertisers:

• • Use the Google Tag or Google Tag Manager as your method for deploying Floodlight tags
  • Review Floodlights and disable the attribution tracking setting for any Floodlights that aren’t needed for attribution or bidding purposes
  • Enable consent mode

• Required in EEA
• Turn on Enhanced Attribution in CM360
• Confirm conversion domains at the placement level
• If using CM360 for tracking, set up Tracking Ads Tags

Taking these actions and utilising these features will ensure your CM360 account is able to take advantage of the latest privacy-safe technology Google is integrating into their products. 

An Exciting Future Ahead

While there are clearly many product and expectation adjustments to be made, Google is confident that despite the impact from 3PCD, CM360 will still meet customer goals surrounding:

• Enterprise campaign activation and management at scale
• Serving and personalising display and video creatives
• Agnostic measurement for brand and performance campaigns
• Quantifying media impact and campaign value

These industry changes and challenges will no doubt lead to impressive innovations across the digital marketing landscape. As we all adapt to the advertising environment without third-party cookies, more and more advanced technology will continue to be developed and integrated into products. We at Making Science are excited for what’s to come and for the opportunity to learn and grow with our customers.

Reach out to Making Science today for help taking the appropriate steps to ready your CM360 account. We offer a comprehensive CM360 audit to ensure your account is efficient and you’re able to meet your advertising goals both now and when third-party cookies are officially deprecated. 

Making Science is a Google Marketing Platform Certified Partner and a leading expert in privacy-safe and compliant advertising practices. We can aid you in implementing Consent Mode, Enhanced Conversions, and more. We also have expertise in Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and can assist with your tagging needs. Send us a message: info@makingscience.com.

Chrome has already begun the 3PC (also known as third-party cookie deprecation), and it’s already impacting your business and marketing performance. In this post, we will discuss how to mitigate the change and prepare for the full phase-out.

What is happening

Following the footsteps of other browsers, Chrome has started deprecating 3PC for 1% of users from the 1st of January 2024. This share will gradually increase until 3PC cookies are deprecated for 100% of users in H2 of 2024. Google is also introducing Privacy Sandbox as an alternative to 3PC to maintain accurate, personalised and useful advertising for users and marketers.

Why it matters

Whilst other browsers have already phased out 3PC, Chrome has the most significant market share worldwide with 65% and will have the biggest impact on advertising. Secondly, this market share is more heavily adopted amongst desktop users who have historically had better conversion rates than mobile users.

Google and Meta have been heavily reliant on 3PCs in the past to help build profiles of users that advertisers can then target. Placing remarketing pixels on your websites has allowed them to see user activity across multiple domains. This makes it easy for advertisers to target users because both Google and Meta had very complete and high quality datasets that allowed for granular marketing activities – this will change.

What will the impact be

The quality of the third-party data (3PD) stored by Google will decline sharply and become incomplete and far less accurate. There will be a shift from user-level data to aggregated data. This will make marketing less efficient and reduce ROAS unless advertisers act to mitigate the change.

Making Science’s 3PC deprecation tool predictor has shown that up to 30% of conversions could be lost. This is due to several factors, including poorer quality traffic and more inefficient targeting. On average, 44% of digital advertising revenue in Europe relies on 3PC, and a recent client case of a global luxury retailer showed that they rely on an average of 30% of revenue in the past month (January 2024) being dependent on 3PC. With Making Science’s tool, we were able to predict a potential loss of up to 9% of digital revenue due to the deprecation. 

With this change, it is Google’s responsibility to provide the tools to advertisers to maintain a strong ROAS, and it is the responsibility of advertisers to implement them. As 3PC deprecation is rolled out, the importance of 3PD vs 1PD is going to shift dramatically towards 1PD – it has always been better, but 3PD has been good enough to get away with having dedicated first-party data strategies.

What can be done to mitigate the impact?

There are lots of options available to handle this change – in fact, too many. It is essential to understand the impact on your business and prioritise the available changes based on ease of implementation and impact. We can bucket the opportunities into mitigation and activation.

Mitigation

These activities are aimed at reducing the loss of data volume and quality by implementing tools provided by Google and collecting better data using durable, privacy-compliant solutions.

1. It’s important to use a consent management platform (CMP) rather than a DIY solution for a consent banner. CMPs integrate with Google’s technical solutions and provide template consent banners that comply with the latest regulatory changes in differing markets, which can become hard to manage as more and more countries and states implement their own privacy legislation.
2. A thorough and robust GA4 implementation will provide confidence in data, become the data source of truth for the business and stay up-to-date with privacy changes, as Google has shown its commitment to keeping GA4 compliant.
3.  Implementing Consent Mode V2 for all Google products and Enhanced Conversions will allow for better matching by Google whilst respecting privacy. Consent Mode is now a requirement for using advertising features within Google products, and Enhanced Conversions allow conversions to be tied to impressions and clicks better, improving the understanding of campaign performance.

These are the essential requirements for dealing with 3PC deprecation, but more measures can be taken if it is justified. Implementing server-side measurement will further improve the robustness of the GA4 implementation and marketing pixels. Using the measurement protocol for key conversions to ensure 1-to-1 matching between internal databases and adtech. A greater understanding of users can be achieved by using a Customer Data Architecture (CDA) or a Customer Data Platform (CDP) and cleanroom analysis can help cluster users together for better aggregated targeting.

Activation

Creating audiences and lists for targeting through 1PD will need to be more prevalent. The first source will create GA4 Audiences that can be passed into Ads and the Google adtech stack based on user behaviour. This should be in action already, but with better data collection, the quality of the audiences that can be created should improve.

Smart Bidding will help to improve campaigns if not already in use. Smart Bidding uses Google’s AI to optimise conversions or conversion value through advanced machine learning and contextual signals. Another increasingly important tool provided by Google is Customer Match. Uploading lists into Ads will enable accurate targeting and reduce the impact of 3PC deprecation. It is an important process to automate as it can otherwise be time-consuming.

Beyond Google’s tools come more advanced methods of improving the signal provided to adtech. Scoring users with predictive modelling tools such as Gauss Smart Advertising will enhance the signals sent into Google’s algorithms, which can start optimising these signals instead.

Setting priorities and winning over stakeholders

Making Science’s 3PC deprecation tool makes planning strategies and quantifying the issue to stakeholders much easier. By analysing the results and different performances of browsers, devices, channels and campaigns – advertisers can assign a monetary value to the impact of 3PC deprecation. This makes getting technical and legal approval for changes such as enhanced conversions into sprints and implemented on-site much easier.

Managing expectations and predicting change is going to be important for marketing teams in 2024 to keep senior stakeholders happy and allow for the marketing strategy to be run without interference.

The Role of Privacy Sandbox

Privacy Sandbox is one of Google’s tools to help replace some functionality once 3PC has been deprecated. Testing and implementing solutions using the Topics API or Protected Audiences will potentially go a long way to mitigating the impact of 3PC deprecation – which is Google’s intention. However, early reports are mixed, and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) raised concerns that Google has answered.

The role of Privacy Sandbox will increase throughout the year, and we need to pay close attention to its capabilities and learn how it will work with advertising campaigns and the impact it will have. But for the short-term, getting these other measures in place is important, and then maximising opportunities from the Privacy Sandbox can become a priority in H2.

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In an era where digital footprints are becoming increasingly elusive, understanding the nuances of conversion tracking is critical for marketers. Conversion modeling stands at the forefront of this change, providing an innovative way to capture data without infringing on user privacy. Today, we explore the depths of Google’s Enhanced Conversions and the crucial role of conversion modeling.

Understanding Conversion Modeling

Conversion modeling is a method that uses aggregated and anonymised data to predict conversions that aren’t directly observable. Instead of relying solely on the decreasing pool of observable data due to privacy changes, it fills in the gaps, offering a more comprehensive view of campaign performance. Google’s approach to modeling ensures that reported conversions present a complete picture, not just a snapshot.

Introducing Enhanced Conversions

In a world where traditional tracking cookies are crumbling, Google’s Enhanced Conversions emerge as a beacon for accurate conversion measurement. This feature utilises conversion modeling to ensure that advertisers can gauge the efficacy of their campaigns, even as third-party cookies become obsolete.

The Necessity of Enhanced Conversions

As reliance on third-party cookies fades, the risk of digital media performance measurement becoming less reliable grows. Enhanced Conversions serve as the necessary bridge to a future where privacy concerns and marketing analytics can coexist harmoniously.

How Enhanced Conversions Work

1. A logged-in Google user clicks on your ad.
2. They make a conversion on your website.
3. The conversion tag on your site captures a predefined piece of user data (like an email), hashes it, and securely transmits it to Google.
4. Google then matches this hashed data against its own, noting a conversion in your account, thereby preserving the integrity of your ad performance data.

You can learn more about how Enhanced Conversions work by clicking here.

The Advantages of Enhanced Conversions

Adopting Enhanced Conversions isn’t just about keeping up with privacy standards—it’s about achieving tangible benefits:

• 5% Increase in Search Conversions: On average, brands adopting Enhanced Conversions for search campaigns see a 5% uptick in conversions.
• 17% Rise in YouTube Conversions: Similarly, a notable 17% average increase in conversions is observed for YouTube campaigns.
• 10%+ Boost for Real Estate: In the real estate sector, one of our clients experienced over a 10% increase in total measured conversions after implementing Enhanced Conversions.

What We’ve Learned from Implementing Enhanced Conversions

• Stakeholder Alignment: It’s crucial to get marketing, legal, privacy, and IT on the same page early in the process to streamline implementation and address compliance concerns proactively.
• Start Small & Scale: Beginning with a single site allows for benchmarking results and a more manageable scale-up process. However, if there’s consistency across brands or sub-brands, a more comprehensive rollout may be feasible.
• Defining Success: It’s important to establish what success looks like upfront, considering the balance between implementation costs and the anticipated lift in conversion tracking.

Unlock the Full Potential of Your Campaigns

Understanding and leveraging foundational data is critical in harnessing the full potential of Enhanced Conversions. The “Foundational Data” section of our AI Essentials Playbook provides you with a deep dive into strategies for creating a strong data strategy, designed for marketers aiming to refine their digital approach in line with Google’s AI Essentials checklist.

Ready to elevate your conversion tracking and embrace the next level of digital marketing maturity?

 Download the “Foundational Data” section of our AI Essentials Playbook and begin your journey toward a sophisticated, AI-accelerated marketing strategy today.

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The holiday season is not just about festivities and celebrations. For businesses, it’s a period of heightened activity, increased customer demand, and fierce competition. With key shopping events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas sales on the horizon, the success of your season depends on your preparedness.

In this guide, curated by the Making Science team, we blend various critical aspects of business operations to help equip businesses with a comprehensive, well-rounded approach to tackle the peak season rush.

1. Scalability: The Backbone of Your Online Store

We all know time is money. According to Gartner, based on industry surveys, network downtime can cost $5,600 per minute on average. This figure equates to well over $300K per hour.

Your online store’s infrastructure serves as the foundation for your digital presence. An influx of shoppers can place immense stress on your infrastructure, making it crucial to predict traffic patterns and scale your resources accordingly. Regular stress tests will help identify and rectify weak points. This proactive approach ensures your systems can handle the increased load, preventing slow loading times, crashes, or dreaded virtual queues keeping your digital storefront open and inviting.

2. Process Monitoring: Make checking out simple!

Don’t let a glitchy shopping cart or an overloaded payment gateway hinder your sales. Monitor the purchasing process every step of the way – from product discovery to payment confirmation for a smooth and efficient shopping experience. With the increase in traffic during peak season, your e-commerce processes, especially payment solutions, should be capable of absorbing traffic spikes so transactions are processed without any issues.

3. Digital Security: Protecting Your Business and Customers

Over half (56%) of Black Friday spam emails received between October 26 and November 6, 2022, were scams, based on research from Bitdefender. Furthermore, small businesses in the retail sector are 50% more likely to be targeted by cybercriminals, leading to a loss of around $6.9 billion due to online scams.

The primary threats include social engineering scams, phishing attacks, fraudulent websites, unsecured financial transactions, ransomware attacks, and data breaches. Given these risks and the heightened digital activity during peak season, businesses must reinforce their digital channels by auditing their website security to safeguard their systems and customer data.

4. Inventory and Logistics: Meeting Demand Efficiently

Handling the increased demand during peak season requires efficient management of inventory and logistics. A sold-out product or delayed delivery can lead to disappointed customers. Keep a close eye on your stock levels, plan for increased shipping and delivery times, and consider liaising with third-party logistics providers to manage the increased demand.

5. Proactive Marketing Strategy: Engaging Your Customers

Stand out from your competitors with well-planned outreach to significantly increase your brand’s visibility and customer engagement. Use a mix of channels like email, targeted ads, and social media to reach your audience with impactful messages. Maximise your outreach impact with an omnichannel strategy that mixes and matches channels to deliver your message to the right audience at the right time. Most importantly, start planning at least 4 weeks in advance, allowing yourself ample time to refine and perfect your messages.

6. AI Integration: Enhancing Performance and Efficiency

Artificial Intelligence has become a game-changer in the digital space. From creating better SEO descriptions to automating repetitive processes, AI technologies can boost your business performance and efficiency. Consider integrating AI-powered tools into your operations, like Gauss AI, our proprietary technology that allows you to automate processes and improve ad performance, reaching customers more effectively.

7. Customer Experience: Prioritising Satisfaction

A positive customer experience extends beyond a user-friendly interface and streamlined checkout process. It’s about providing timely and effective support. Incorporating FAQ and Feedback sections on your site can help customers find information quickly and share their experiences. To take it a step further, consider implementing AI-based chatbots ensuring help is just a click away, at any time.

8. Contingency Planning: Preparing for the Unexpected

Despite the best preparations, unexpected issues can occur. Having robust contingency plans helps your business respond quickly and effectively to potential system crashes, payment gateway failures, or unexpected traffic spikes, minimising disruption and maintaining customer satisfaction.

This guide forms a solid foundation for your business as you gear up for the peak holiday season. Remember, preparation is key to turning these challenges into opportunities for growth.

The time to start is now! As always, The Making Science team is here to guide you every step of the way. Let’s make this holiday season a resounding success together!