Effective Marketing in a Cookieless world
The cookie is about to crumble… what does this mean for your business?
Due to its significance I wanted to dedicate an entire article to it. While it’s a more technical aspect of marketing and for some of you, you may prefer to stick a fork in your eye than to read this article, I highly recommend hanging in there - it is a big deal. As a business owner or a marketer it is important that you know that it is happening and what it means for your business.
They key topics that are covered in this article are:
* The impacts of a cookieless world
* What is a cookie
* What is third party, second party and first party data
* Why is third party data being removed
* How you can ensure you’re collecting relevant first party data
* How to use first party data in your marketing
Why all the fuss - what are the impacts of cookieless world:
1. Advertising Targeting:
Reduced Precision: Cookies provided granular user data for targeted ads. Without them, targeting might rely more on contextual signals or aggregated data.
Shift to Alternative Methods: Advertisers are exploring alternative methods like first-party data, contextual targeting, and cohort-based advertising (like Google's FLoC - Federated Learning of Cohorts).
2. Measurement and Analytics:
Challenges in Attribution: Tracking user journeys becomes complex without cookies, impacting the ability to accurately attribute conversions.
Emphasis on First-Party Data: Companies will rely more on first-party data for insights and analytics.
3. Privacy and Compliance:
Enhanced User Privacy: A cookieless environment aims to improve user privacy by limiting tracking and data collection without explicit consent.
Compliance Focus: Companies need to adhere to stricter privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA, ensuring transparent data practices.
4. Industry Changes:
Technology Evolution: Innovations in tracking and targeting technologies are emerging to adapt to the cookieless landscape.
Shift in Business Models: Companies reliant on third-party data might need to pivot towards building direct relationships with customers for data collection.
5. Content Personalization:
Need for Dynamic Personalization: To personalize content, companies may increasingly rely on AI-driven algorithms analyzing user behavior in real-time.
6. Customer Relationships:
Focus on Trust and Transparency: Building trust and offering transparency in data practices becomes pivotal to maintaining customer relationships.
7. Cross-Platform Experience:
Unified Experience Challenge: With limited tracking across devices, ensuring a seamless cross-platform user experience becomes challenging.
8. Adaptation and Innovation:
Rise of New Solutions: This shift spurs innovation, encouraging the development of new technologies and strategies for marketing and advertising.
9. Ecosystem Collaboration:
Industry Collaboration: Collaboration within the advertising and technology ecosystem becomes crucial to finding common solutions and standards.
What is a cookie?
A cookie is a piece of data from a website that is stored within a web browser that the website can retrieve at a later time. Cookies are used to tell the server that users have returned to a particular website. When users return to a website, a cookie provides information and allows the site to display selected settings and targeted content.
Cookies also store information such as shopping cart contents, registration or login credentials, and user preferences. This is done so that when users revisit sites, any information that was provided in a previous session or any set preferences can be easily retrieved.
Advertisers use cookies to track user activity across sites so they can better target ads. While this particular practice is usually offered to provide a more personalized user experience, however this has caused some concern from people who also view this as a privacy concern
And this is the key driver behind the change in the use of cookies moving forward…
Announced back in 2020, Google announced that it will end support for third-party tracking cookies in the Google Chrome browser “within two years,” signifying major changes for retargeting Google Ads. In June 2021, this timeline was extended to 2023, while June 2022 brought yet another extension to finally land in the 2nd half of 2024.
Other browsers, such as Safari, Firefox, and Edge, have already stopped supporting 3rd party cookies for retargeting ads. But from the marketer’s point of view, the fact that Google will also follow this trend for retargeting Google Ads is important due to Chrome’s over 60% market share.
This created alarm bells for me thinking how will retargeting ads work without cookies? That is why I’ve dedicated an episode to it so you can 1: Understand what it is 2)what it means for your marketing and 3) How you can ensure you’re prepared and set up for ongoing effective marketing
What is the difference between Third Party data, second party data and First Party Data
We have third party data cookies and first party data cookies and there is also 2nd party data.
* The data that you have collected yourself is called “first-party”
* Second-party data is first-party data shared with you by another company, usually a trusted partner
* Third-party data is data collected by a business or company with no relationship with you or the customer
First party data is "Essentially you or your business are the first party that has collected unique information about your audience directly from your audience. First party data can include things like:Demographic informationBehaviors or actions taken across your website, app, and or product
Data in your CRMSocial media conversations Subscription-based emails or products Survey dataCustomer feedback Customer purchase history Online chat transcripts"
Whereas third party data is "Third party data is any data collected by a business without any direct link to your business or audience. Its scope is much wider than first and second party data."
"Third party data is sometimes compiled from multiple different sources and is sold to or bought by companies to learn more about audiences. However, since it’s not directly collected from your actual paying customers and is also available to your competitors, it may not be as useful as first or second party data. Third party data can, however, give you a wider view of audiences that your data could not."
Source: Hubspot
Cookies were designed to give personalised settings for internet web users and have been used in advertising to identify consumers and target advertising to the relevant audience. Relevant advertising is crucial in providing tailored experiences to consumers. Third-party cookies have become a key piece of technology for ad tech vendors to be able to support the most common advertising use cases. And has been used for cross-site tracking and ad serving.
What does this mean for your business and your marketing?
It means that you want to know what first party data that you’re already collecting and then determine what else you should look to collect, and how you will collect that data.
There are lots of first-party data sources that can be incorporated into your advertising and marketing automation. Some examples include:
* Emails
* Phone numbers
* Purchase history/products used
* Analytics traffic on your website
* Product analytics
* Survey data
* NPS/customer feedback
* Social media channel analytics (like demographic information of where your followers are, and what content is the most engaging)
Any data from customers or prospects in your CRM or product is considered first-party data, which can come from online or offline sources.
How to start collecting first-party data
As already mentioned, you should start with an audit of the data you are currently collecting. You probably have a lot of useful data that can be used in your marketing activities. Once you understand what you have, then you can determine what gaps you need to fill and how to improve your outreach.
Consider at which points in the customer journey you can ask questions about what your audience's interests are, their preferences, and what their challenges are related to your product or service. A classic one is to ask a new visitor to your website to subscribe to your newsletter in exchange for a discount code. You may also use tools such as surveys and net promoter score.
How to start using first-party data in your marketing strategy
* Focus on email marketing and SEO
With the end of cookies in sight, non-paid channels may become increasingly important. Especially email marketing. First party customer data like the products or brands customers have bought previously, can make your emails extra effective. A data management platform, such as a data warehouse, can be used to collect and store this data.
* Content marketing
Another way to reach your target audiences is with content marketing. And be sure to share the content on social, distributing the content with email and using SEO best practices when creating the content.
* Strategic partnerships
Retargeting won’t work the same, but there are other ways that you can reach your audience. Consider strategic partnerships - think about which sites does your target audience visit? What similar products or services are your customers searching for? Are there blogs, influencers, or forums where your customers hang out that you can be present on? Try setting up strategic partnerships in order to run ads in the right places, even without the use of cookies.
* Server side-tagging
Server side-tagging is a tag on your site. However, it’s one script that’s yours and that sends data to your cloud or on-premise server. This is a new way of working with tags on your website to gather first-party data and feed only the data you choose into the advertising platforms for optimisation. So instead of the platforms being a black box that hides what data points they collect and how they use it, you’re able to ensure only certain chunks of first-party data are fed into the algorithms.
* Make use of customer data platforms
A CDP (customer data platform) is a platform that allows you to build detailed customer profiles based on your website and email data. As long as you collect this data yourself, it is considered first party data. A CDP also gives you the opportunity to show personalised content to different user segments.
For instance, if a person has visited your hotel website before and only browsed restaurant or events information (and not hotel rooms), you can use the CDP to show restaurants on the homepage the next time this visitor lands on your website.
Another smart way to use a CDP is to send personalised emails to people, showing them the products they showed interest in earlier.
To wrap up…
Start creating your first-party data strategy sooner rather than later, because we know the end of third-party cookies is close. There are more ways to collect and utilise this data than you may think, so don’t let this feel like a limiting factor. There are more opportunities in first-party customer data than you may think.
Start implementing some new strategies like surveys, interest-based placements, contextual advertising, and server-side tagging, but remember to always keep privacy top of mind.
There is also an industry wide effort to develop new technology that will improve people's privacy across the Web and apps. The Privacy Sandbox initiative will phase out third-party cookies and limit covert tracking. By creating new web standards, it will provide publishers with safer alternatives to existing technology, so they can continue building digital businesses
