A cookie-less future.
No, it’s not a radical new diet plan. It’s actually a complete overhaul of how data is collected and used online. When Google announced back in 2020 that it was planning to phase out the use of third-party cookies, sales and marketing teams across the globe found themselves in a spin. And it wasn’t just Google; Apple and Mozilla have also begun to depreciate third-party cookies on their web browsers.
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Without the ability to target individuals based on the data collected by cookies, marketers wondered how they would fill their sales funnels with good-quality prospects.
Fortunately, Google has pushed back the plan several times and more information has emerged on how marketing via Google will work. Think about it, Google generates a lot of revenue from marketing so they won’t want to destroy that arm of their business.
Instead, we’re more likely to see a change in how we target people.
What are 3rd party cookies?
Cookies are text files containing small pieces of data that can identify your device and track your online habits. Websites place 1st party cookies on a user’s device when they visit that site. 3rd party cookies, however, are placed by websites the user isn’t currently browsing. They then use a buyer’s online habits for cross-site tracking, targeted marketing, and remarketing.
Why are cookies being phased out
For a long time, users have viewed third-party cookies as an infringement of privacy. In a survey, 86% of the US population stated that data privacy is a growing concern. Security concerns and uncertainty over how data is used are other major factors in the decision to phase out third-party cookies.
Cookies track users’ behavior without them knowing. Even now, marketing compliance legislation requires users to accept cookies. Unfortunately, many people click ‘accept’ out of habit and don’t always realize what it means.
While many businesses store cookies on their users’ devices for genuine reasons, some people do it for malicious reasons. Cookies enable third parties to build a detailed profile of each user and the detail in the data profiles third parties can build would startle you.
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These can enable cybercriminals to impersonate users to gain control access to personal devices, steal passwords, gather financial data, and or even install malware. It’s important as a company to build a protocol for this into your employee remote access policy or even your third-party risk management framework to ensure people with access to your system are vigilant.
In addition, we’re also seeing regulators cracking down on data collection after landmark legislation in Europe and California has been passed. These laws mean high fines and penalties can be enforced if breaches are found. Google itself has paid hundreds of millions in fines already, so it’s understandable they’d want to take meaningful action.
How will this impact online engagement for sales and marketing teams?
Firstly, many view this as a positive thing. Increased security, privacy, and transparency should benefit everyone, right?
Well, not quite.
Digital marketing has been evolving and improving for years. It has become a pillar of most businesses’ marketing strategy. Understanding how a cookiless future will impact current marketing strategies is crucial.
Sales and marketing teams have been voicing concerns, and with good reason. Marketers rely on third-party cookies to store personal identifiers and exchange data between websites. This is a vital part of targeted marketing and crucial in building relevant campaigns that hit the right audience.
The concern is that cookies enable highly personalized marketing. This is a proven way of boosting online engagement and converting potential leads into paying customers.
Current methods of engagement will therefore be subject to several challenges in a cookieless world:
- Fewer opportunities to personalize advertisements on other websites
- Difficulties in reaching customer segments effectively could lead to a reduction in ROI
- Less informative insights and conversion monitoring difficulties
- Smaller audience sizes
- Lower conversion rates
- Disjointed user experience
- Increased workload to produce similar results
- Poorer quality of data leads to ineffective decision-making
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Customers will also be affected. Initially, customers may notice that ads and company communications are less personalized. This could frustrate some users, who will start to have a less predictable and less relevant digital experience.
Preparation in key – what can you do?
Just as you would pre-empt vendor management risks, web users want to protect themselves from security issues arising from third-party cookies. For this reason, the shift is understandable. However, from a business perspective, there are things you can do to get ready for a cookiless future.
“Although the disappearance of 3rd party cookies is often seen as a threat to the effectiveness of digital marketing, we believe it answers a growing customer need for awareness and understanding of privacy and data exchange.”
Dirk De Raaf,
Head of Quantitive Marketing at KLM
When cookies disappear, the success of your business will depend on your ability to adapt. This means finding new ways of analyzing audiences and tracking ads. While we may see the end to third-party cookies, first-party cookies will still exist. These will still allow for a level of personalization, targeting, and audience segmentation by using alternative tracking signals.
Use first-party data
Collecting data straight from your audience can be a great tool. It can provide marketing teams with some of the most crucial data for targeting their audience, such as:
- Demographics
- Website interactions, including visits and time spent on each website
- Buying history
- Contact details
Businesses can collect this directly through emails, purchase history, website browsing habits, and customer accounts. First-party data has the benefit of offering greater transparency on the information you collect on your customers and visitors whilst still providing a detailed overview of your customer’s preferences, behaviors, and buying habits.
In this context, ensuring high email deliverability becomes crucial, as it directly impacts the effectiveness of marketing campaigns by ensuring that communications actually reach the customer’s inbox. This is especially important as email remains a primary communication channel in a cookieless world.
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Collect zero-party data
Zero-party data is data that users knowingly provide, usually via surveys and polls. Because the data is willingly provided, businesses don’t need to worry about privacy intrusions. The accuracy of the data is normally good, too, because the target audience or customers provide it.
Some great methods of collecting zero-party data are:
- Newsletter sign ups
- Survey and polls
- Customer accounts
- Using interactive content
To increase engagement and encourage more people to volunteer zero-party data, companies often offer incentives. Things such as free ebooks, discount vouchers, raffle entries, or a webinar work well, for example.
Utilize omnichannel touchpoints
With many customers still enjoying an offline experience, companies can integrate data collection from a range of on and offline touchpoints. Data can be collected offline in several ways, such as:
- Loyalty cards
- Taking email addresses at the checkout to send e-receipts
- Customer feedback QR codes on receipts (if incentivized, even better)
- Use of beacons to track customers’ in-store buying habits through their personal mobile devices. These work well with store apps too.
- Offer click and collect. The personal details customers need to input for a click-and-collect order can be valuable for personalization.
Pulling together all your on- and offline data will ensure a seamless experience for customers who interact via multiple channels. The data collected will also ensure that when you do communicate with customers, you can still personalize it. You can do this with valuable offers and recommendations, giving you the best chance of ensuring customer engagement.
The key to the success of collecting data via online and offline touchpoints is making sure staff are trained and equipped for the change. Flipbooks are a great way of training staff remotely or on-site and ensure a standardized approach to covering new content.
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Leverage social media saved audiences
Social media are a treasure trove of personal data. When signing up to social media, people have to accept the terms and conditions. These enable SM companies to collect valuable personal and behavioral data.
While many social media platforms use 3rd party cookies in their pixels, many are switching to 3rd party alternatives. This will still enable businesses to leverage social media to target people based on interests, behaviors, and so on.
Use enhanced conversion
Google Ads offers an enhanced conversion feature. This enables you to measure conversion rates and user interactions on your website more accurately than ever before. Conversion data is enhanced with additional 1st-party data provided by users (such as email addresses) and authenticated by Google.
For example, if a user signs in to their Google account and clicks an ad on YouTube that takes them to your site where they make a purchase, the hashed data is securely sent to Google. This is then matched to your user profile and a conversion rate is reported on your account.
Contextualized advertising
Contextual advertising means placing adverts on web pages that are more relevant and closely linked to the product without advertising the same thing. For example, advertising sunglasses on a travel operator’s website or travel blog as a way to hit your target audience. The trick is to use relevant types of lead magnets to draw people into your sales funnel.
Contextual advertising may not be as effective as behavioral advertising (where you place ads based on customer behavior regardless of the website content) for many reasons. However, it is a valid privacy-friendly contender in light of a clutterless digital landscape.
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Use universal identifiers
Identifiers that offer a private alternative to 3rd party cookies. They can identify visitors based on their access to websites and apps. Identifiers such as IP addresses, pixel tags, advertising IDs, and device fingerprints can offer detailed insights into user behavior.
Identifiers are a great alternative to 3rd party cookies. They can still enable businesses to utilize personalization across multiple channels in a cookie-free digital space.
Create cohorts
Once you’ve collected first-party data, you can use this along with other digital insights to create audience segments without the need for third party cookies. First of all, you’ll need to set up cohorts which are lists of users grouped through similar attributes or identifiers.
You can then target each cohort with more personalized marketing to generate engagement. You can then monitor the effectiveness of each campaign and tweak and refine the marketing accordingly to get better results.
Use a consent management platform
A consent manager platform is a tool that assists websites in collecting and managing user consent that is needed for processing personal data. It simplifies the whole process of handling consent much easier and improves transparency of the process.
The usual format for CMPs is a pop-up notifying users that their data is being collected; asking to accept or decline certain data preferences, or requesting permission for certain data to be used.
Create a future-proof privacy policy
Planning privacy advances ahead of time can help future-proof your marketing strategy. Online privacy will always be a priority, so having a robust privacy policy is essential. Demonstrating respect for privacy shows your customers that they matter to you and you understand their concerns. Part of this will mean an ongoing commitment to privacy in data collection.
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With the phasing out of cookies, this has become more apparent than ever so take the time now to review your policy and look at potential risks in the future so you can plan ahead. As businesses adapt to new methods, hackers will find a way to exploit them, so be aware of emerging threats.
Final thoughts on a Cookieless Future
The key to a cookiless future that doesn’t impact online engagement is preparation and planning. You can do that by keeping updated with what’s happening with cookies and privacy improvements and which platforms are affected. This will enable you to plan alternative marketing methods to ensure online engagement isn’t negatively impacted.
Getting on board with the move demonstrates an understanding of your customer’s concerns. Improving privacy and security will benefit businesses and customers alike in the long run – because, as I noted above, cookies pose a threat to businesses too.
Adapting to more privacy-friendly marketing methods is a more holistic approach that, if we embrace new methods, may lead to higher-quality leads in the future.
And that’s the way the cookie crumbles!
