In the first part of our series on using first-party data in online advertising, we explained why first-party data is important for media targeting and improving campaign performance. In this part, we will take a closer look at how to collect first-party data correctly and send it to media systems. We will go through the full journey of first-party data, from the dataLayer through normalization and hashing to sending it via server-side Google Tag Manager (sGTM) to Google Ads and Meta. The goal is to give you a practical guide that you can implement right away, including code snippets, edge cases, and the places where things most often break in practice.
The cookie apocalypse and the many other attempts at coming up with an original name for the end of third-party cookies in Google Chrome thankfully stopped haunting our LinkedIn feeds sometime in early 2024. What it did do, however, was spark an industry-wide conversation about working with first-party data . That is proving to be a key step toward better measurement and stronger campaign performance today.