Only if you have been living under a rock would you have missed the controversies and reports about the misuse of user data. As data privacy demands soar, regulations and laws around data use are becoming stricter.
In this guide, we will help you navigate the impact of cookieless marketing and discuss your alternatives. The topics covered are:
Cookies: Good or Bad for Your Digital Health
Going Cookieless: Disruptive but Necessary
The Future of Cookieless Marketing
What More Can Marketers Do to Stay Relevant and Effective
This demand for user data protection directly impacts how digital marketers have so far tracked and used data. They use a data-collecting code called a cookie to track user activity and gather information.
Let’s go back a little, look at what cookies are, and figure out if they are all bad.
Cookies: Good or Bad for Your Digital Health
A small file gets stored on your device when you visit a website. This file is called a cookie, and it tracks your visit to the website and stores your data for when you return.
Sounds innocuous, right? Well, it is that and is also helpful, but only as a first-party cookie.
First-party cookies work within a single web domain and mainly improve the user experience. They auto-fill login details, remember your cart additions an keep your session in sync.
All in all, first-party cookies are pretty harmless and may get termed as essential cookies.
The problem starts with third-party cookies. Third-party cookies gather information about the users and send them to advertisers and other websites.
When you hover your mouse over an advertisement banner or image, it receives information about your browsing history. It then pushes the advertisements related to the items you may be looking at, making it seem like the product is chasing you across the internet.
As you can see, cross-website tracking is the real issue.
Going Cookieless: Disruptive but Necessary
The intent behind third-party cookies was to give more control to the end-users over their Internet browning experience. But advertisement companies jumped on this technology to create and deliver highly targeted ads.
The era of cookies is about to come to an end, though.
As 2023 comes to a close, it will be curtains for cookies too. Google is planning to stop supporting third-party cookies on its Chrome web browser.
Digital marketers need to update their playbooks and figure out new ways of measuring impact. The focus is already shifting to consent-driven advertising.
With Apple introducing the ‘Ask App to Not Track’ feature in 2021, traditional user activity tracking has already been disrupted. Brands are now collecting incomplete data about users and their activities.
The key to staying relevant is to focus on building customer relationships over time with the help of first-party touchpoints.
The Future of Cookieless Marketing
With cookieless marketing, retargeting will take a back seat. Marketers will not be able to track and follow up on users who may have visited the website without making a purchase.
Typically, retargeting allows marketers to personalize the experience for users and help turn visitors into customers.
After third-party cookies become unsupported by all significant web browsers, digital marketers will need to rethink new ways of converting prospects.
While digital marketers have handled tech disruptions previously, this one is different. It impacts that engagement point where a user has not yet become a prospect.
Here are a few things marketers need to focus on as we move toward a cookieless world.
1. Get ready for disruption with restrategizing.
Digital marketers need to rethink their marketing strategies as there will be many overlapping and cascading effects of going cookieless.
The ad targeting landscape will change as user identification, and tracking becomes more complex with privacy protocols.
Without retargeting, the focus of customer engagement will shift toward first-party interactions.
2. Figure out new ways to measure the impact.
Till now, marketers have relied on data from cookies to track conversions and engagement. With consent-based tracking coming into effect, marketers will have to figure out new ways of measuring the effectiveness of their campaigns and ads.
This approach would require more direct interaction with customers and also getting data from other platforms.
3. Reallocate media spending by taking a unified approach.
It would be difficult to build accurate and personalized profiles of users without insight into their behavior. However, the new approach must include gaining and keeping the users’ trust and not just exploiting their personal data.
A first-party approach to gathering personal data can be combined with the use of contextual data and predictive modeling. Contextual data can include data points like location, transaction history, and household composition, among others.
Using machine learning algorithms, it is possible to build a predictive model of consumer behavior by entering the contextual and other data points. This approach can help marketers find new potential customers.
Therefore, the marketing budget would require reallocation to focus on effective information gathering like contextual data. Marketers may have to downgrade their retargeting budget and invest in more cutting-edge AI technology.
What More Can Digital Marketers Do to Stay Relevant and Effective
The onus is now more on marketers to find new ways to track user behavior and collect data.
We have already discussed the necessity of applying a combination of:
- contextual data for targeting
- alternative for tracking without cookies
- AI-driven tech for predictive modeling
- first-party data collection strategy
Let us now see what more actions and approaches marketers can focus on going forward.
1. Focus on innovative approaches.
Innovative, but not necessarily new approaches like zero-party data collection. Zero-party data is data given directly and explicitly by the customer to the brand for improving their user experience.
Having a strategy to collect first-party and zero party data would need marketers to focus on:
- Tracking preference patterns based on first-party user behavior
- Creating engaging and emotionally evocative content for users
- Actively asking users for their content preferences
The trick here is to find the right balance between creating engagement and building trust. If you bombard the user with too many questions and forms, they may lose interest. If you are too aggressive in data collection, you may make them uncomfortable.
The balanced approach of asking for some data and then building on the interaction gradually also builds trust.
Pro tip: Design easy-to-use, simple data collection pages like data clouds/balloons or checkboxes for collecting preferences, making it easy for users to share information.
2. Connect with customers with engaging content.
Content is king – this adage is known and accepted universally, and it has never been more relevant. When customers engage with your brand’s content, they are more likely to share their preferences with you.
Over time, you can build your contextual data profile by tracking your content engagement patterns. This profile will be far more accurate and personal than any third-party cookie data collection effort.
With such accurate and relevant data points, it is possible to make targeted advertising more effective.
Pro tip: Keep your content strategy up-to-date with a mix of new styles, trending stories, and timely topics like mental health.
3. Keep up with the new digital trends arising from new disruptions.
We have already seen the impact on user data privacy.
For example, with the new data regulations, all brands would go on to create their databases for collecting first-party data. A side-effect of this approach will be login fatigue.
Users are bound to get tired of creating so many logins and remembering them. To combat this challenge and improve user experience, SSO (Single Sign On) may be set up. However, this setup is not final yet.
As a marketer, you would do well to stay on top of such developments.
The Next Steps Towards Cookieless World
Demand for data privacy has changed the conversation around how brands manage customer data. If you are a digital marketer, you will do well to start exploring alternatives to cookie-based advertisements and campaigns.
Once one of the most popular web browsers, Google’s Chrome, stops supporting third-party cookies, digital marketing will never be the same.
However, all is not lost. With help from digital marketing agencies like ours, who always have strategies to handle any disruptions in the digital world, you can deal with anything.
It is imperative to gain users’ trust, and tracking their activities is secondary.
You can start designing a cookie-alternative strategy to implement once third-party cookies go obsolete. You can test these strategies and perfect them for your audience. Staying on top of trends and investing in relevant technologies is also a good idea.
Get in touch with us to know more about preparing for the cookieless future of digital advertising. We are here for you.
