In a cookieless world, why are data collection strategies essential for brands
The growing importance of zero-party data
The marketing world is facing a major challenge: Google’s elimination of third-party cookies. There is no doubt, the future of digital marketing is going to be impacted. But, marketers could turn this change into an opportunity. Solutions exist — first-party data and zero-party data being a big part of it — but for that, brands and advertisers need to take this reality into account right now.
What’s happening with third-party cookies?
Just in case you haven’t heard the news, after Safari, Firefox and Explorer, Google announced that it would phase out third-party cookies of its Chrome browser by 2022. This means:
Don’t panic; this is not the end of digital advertising. Personalisation will still be possible beyond the third-party cookies. Alternative solutions exist (we’ll cover that in the ebook); 2021 will all be about testing, learning and adapting.
🍪Cookie: a cookie is a small piece of code stored in a user’s browser when he visits a website. It enables collecting customer data to recognise them and keep track of their preferences to provide a better and more personalised user experience.
⚙️First-party cookie: a first-party cookie is stored by the website that a user visits directly. It enables the browser to remember user information like purchase intentions, logins and language preferences.
🎯Third-party cookie: a third-party cookie is created by websites other than the one a user visits directly, like advertisers websites and social media. It is used for tracking, retargeting and online advertising purposes.
Session State Section. Cookieless Свойство
Определение
Некоторые сведения относятся к предварительной версии продукта, в которую до выпуска могут быть внесены существенные изменения. Майкрософт не предоставляет никаких гарантий, явных или подразумеваемых, относительно приведенных здесь сведений.
Возвращает или задает значение, указывающее, используются ли файлы cookie для идентификации сеансов клиентов.
Значение свойства
Примеры
Комментарии
Существует два способа, с помощью которых состояние сеанса может хранить уникальный идентификатор, связывающий клиента с сеансом сервера: путем сохранения файла cookie HTTP на клиенте или путем кодирования идентификатора сеанса в URL-адресе. Сохранение идентификатора сеанса в файле cookie является более безопасным, но требует, чтобы клиентский браузер поддерживал файлы cookie.
Для приложений, которые разрешают клиентам, которые не поддерживают файлы cookie, например разнообразные мобильные устройства, идентификатор сеанса может храниться в URL-адресе. Параметр URL имеет несколько недостатков. Для этого требуется, чтобы ссылки на сайте были относительными, а страница была перенаправлена в начале сеанса новыми значениями строки запроса, и она предоставляет идентификатор сеанса прямо в строке запроса, где его можно использовать для атаки безопасности.
Рекомендуется использовать режим без файлов cookie, только если требуется поддержка клиентов, у которых отсутствует поддержка файлов cookie.
5 Ways You Can Get Ready for the Cookieless World
Opensense and Tugboat Logic recently hosted a webinar on the cookieless future (check out the webinar recording and the blog post for the full context on cookieless).
But if you’d rather get up to speed here, then this paraphrase of Snoop Dogg sums everything up: if you ain’t up on thangs, Google is the name, and killing tracking cookies is the game 🍪
Here are 5 tactics you should implement now before Google takes away all the cookies in 2022:
1. Keep this convo going with your data, sales, web dev, and exec teams.
We marketers always have to be educating both internal (our teammates) and external (our customers and prospective buyers) audiences. Even if you don’t feel like you have enough info about the topic, you should at least start bringing this conversation up with the broader GTM team.
A good start would be with your marketing team (especially your boss), followed by the ops (both sales and marketing) folks. And assuming you have web developers and data/analytics people who maintain your website and customer data servers, they would be the next best group to brief.
Here are some articles you can share internally:
1a. If you’re at a company with over 100 employees, here’s what you need to do.
Email signatures are unassuming, but everyone reads them (I’m willing to bet my non-existent 401k savings that you’ve peeked at your fair share of people’s email signatures). The great thing about email signatures is the fact that it’s prime real estate: ad blockers don’t block them and pretty much everyone has an email signature (especially those execs that fall in your ICP).
3. Practice good CRM hygiene habits.
I’m guilty of not following CRM hygiene best practices. It’s a drag at times, and when I look at all the misspelled contacts and missing demographic info in my CRM, I immediately head to the kitchen to grab the cheese grater (because I’d rather cheese grate my face than clean up that mess).
In all seriousness, I recommend the next best thing to do is make sure you’re running CRM cleaning campaigns with your ops peeps (both sales and marketing ops, if your company employs both) every quarter. Like cleaning your house, it’s best to clean up your CRM little by little every month so that you don’t feel overwhelmed at how tall of an order it is. But, if cleaning it every month is a stretch for you, then aim to clean it quarterly by:
This one is pretty self-explanatory. I will say that this is one tactic you should work on with your product and UX teams.
Note: I am not recommending gamifying how your users and customers log into their accounts (thanks to Nir Eyal, we all see how insidious gamification can be). I think there are ways to reduce even more friction around logging in and making it easier for users to stay logged in (e.g. the right mix of push notifications and pop-ups).
5. Always assume your audience wants to maintain as much privacy as possible.
By no means is this a call to “think differently” or “paradigm shift.” But, I will say that erring on the side of more privacy will greatly benefit your brand’s relationship with customers and prospective buyers.
Our audience is smart, and they’re not too thrilled about how smart advertising has become. Given their negative sentiments, the least we can do for our audience is to treat them with dignity and respect their wishes to browse and shop privately from time to time. When they want to engage with us, they’ll certainly come find us.
Putting it all together
These five tactics might seem basic, but they’re a good foundational start for you and your team.
All you have to do now is be like Nike ( or Shia) and just do it!
What Is The Future Of Advertising In A Cookie-less World?
Thought Leadership Manager, dentsu
The global demand for privacy is one of the most consequential consumer dynamics at play today. Across the globe, 91% of consumers are concerned about the amount of data companies can collect about them, i and 42% have taken steps to reduce the amount of data they share online. ii In light of this demand for increased privacy, most technology platforms have recently implemented or announced restrictions around data collection and user tracking through their web browsers and operating systems.
The end of third-party cookies and the rise of other types of tracking prevention impact organisations across three key dimensions.
Some alternative routes are already known, such as the all-important first-party data sources. Other routes are still in development, such as Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoCs), each with different potentials for scale, levels of investment needed, and infrastructure requirements.
For most brands, business continuation and growth are not likely to come from a single alternative, but from a blend of alternatives unique to their needs. In many instances, we believe it will likely be based on a combination of first-party data relationships, partnerships with walled gardens, non audience-based targeting solutions such as contextual targeting, and hybrid measurement models.
It is fine if your organisation hasn’t figured out the best option yet. You are not running behind as there is still time to adapt – but you shouldn’t wait any longer to plan your transition to a new model.
Cookieless targeting: What it is and how it applies to advertising
What is cookieless targeting?
Cookieless targeting refers to a number of audience-targeting methods in which cookies are not used, either because they don’t work, or the use of third-party cookies is not allowed. Cookieless advertising is gaining in popularity as privacy concerns continue to increase and data regulations regarding the use of personally identifiable information (PII) roll out globally. As the advertising industry continues to evolve, we can expect marketers to use new, cookieless ways to target audiences. One such method is through contextual advertising, which can be a highly effective AI-powered form of targeting that doesn’t require cookies.
What are cookies?
Cookies are small pieces of code that are placed within your browser whenever you visit a specific website. They typically contain two pieces of information: 1) the site name and, 2) a unique user ID. Cookies may capture details such as website configuration, language preferences, login information, or any products you’ve added to your online shopping cart.
How are cookies used?
Cookies collect user data such as page clicks, viewed pages, how you interact with a website, along with PII such as device ID, name, address, passwords, and even credit card numbers. Cookies were created with the intention of providing a targeted and personalized experience to those using the internet.
By using the data collected via cookies, advertisers sought to improve their decision-making process and maximize the user experience they created for audiences. There are two different uses of cookies to know about.
First-party cookies
First-party cookies are used to understand the behavior of visitors to a website and are created by the host domain or the domain a user is visiting. They are used to create a better user experience and keep a session going. First-party cookies can remember key behavioral information like usernames, language preferences, and what items have been added to shopping carts.
Third-party cookies
Third-party cookies are the backbone of programmatic advertising and are created by domains other than the one a user is visiting. They are mainly used for tracking purposes and online advertising.
How does cookieless advertising work?
There is often confusion surrounding how cookieless advertising can work. Here are a few ways to target audiences without the use of cookies.
Authenticated targeting
Authenticated solutions* work by getting explicit consent from a user to use their data. This can appear in a pop-up or login screen when a user enters a site and views the content.
Anonymous targeting
Anonymous targeting does not require explicit consent to identify and track users. Instead, alternative methods like contextual or aggregated targeting allow advertisers to target specific audiences anonymously.
What does cookieless targeting mean for consumers?
Apple’s decision to no longer support third-party cookies* will give consumers more control over the personal data they share with companies and organizations online. Moving forward, they’ll be required to give explicit consent for data to be collected and consumers will have a better understanding of which companies capture behavioral data.
One potential downside to the loss of cookies is that personalization of a website’s experience could become less common and result in more irrelevant ads being shown. However, personalization will certainly not go away completely as advertisers continue to utilize both new and old tactics, backed by AI and machine learning, to provide users a personalized and data-safe experience.
What does cookieless targeting mean for advertisers?
As an immediate effect, most third-party audience data will diminish in size. Audience data will still be available as first-party or second-party cookie data. However, we can expect this data to be completely clean of cookie-based third-party data and be GDPR compliant*.
Moving forward, advertisers will need to rely more heavily on cookieless tactics to segment and target audiences so that they can continue to provide them a personalized experience and leverage data that helps inform future decision-making.
Is it possible to target ads without cookies?
The online advertising industry* has been focusing its energy and attention primarily on cookie-based targeting. Advances in machine learning and AI have opened up a new world of opportunities for intelligent targeting, which is privacy-friendly and doesn’t require user-profiling.
One way to do this is through contextual targeting, which gives advertisers the opportunity to see and react in real-time to insights derived from live content consumption. This dynamic data can be used to target and scale campaigns just as effectively as a cookie-based targeting method.
How can you manage the shift toward cookieless targeting?
As the shift toward cookieless targeting occurs, advertisers will wonder what their job will look like and the tools that’ll be used to fill the gap. Here are some ways to get started.
Predictive analytics and better messaging
Many organizations have vast amounts of information at their disposal. However, most executives struggle to gain insights in a timely manner. In fact, only 23 percent of those surveyed noted that their organization was strong in this category.
By leveraging machine learning in advertising, teams can reach conclusions faster to better determine the next course of action. AI in advertising also does not need cookies to be effective in crafting messaging because it can leverage algorithms to better identify what works and what doesn’t.
Using predictive messaging enabled by AI can help you personalize your advertising in a cookieless world. Additionally, predictive analytics can help segment audiences based on what messages they will respond to and what will resonate with them most.
Hyperlocal weather targeting
Understanding the local demand patterns requires tapping into the neighborhood characteristics of a given store and other factors outside retailers’ control like current events and weather conditions. With the ever-expanding network of The Weather Company, an IBM Business, to include sensors from cell phones and other sources, your team can go beyond airport data for more localized weather insights.
Additionally, by filtering in location data, you can gain a better understanding of how clients may react to specific types of weather. Sixty degrees in Southern Florida feels different to consumers than 60 degrees after a long winter in Maine.
Conversational marketing
Seventy-one percent* of customers expect companies to communicate with them in real-time and 79 percent of companies say that live chat* has had positive results for customer loyalty, sales and revenue. This can be explored through conversational marketing, which is a method that engages consumers in dialogue-driven, personalized experiences on a one-to-one level. This enables brands to listen and gain unique customer insights while providing value to the user.
Apply personalization tactics
Personalization has become increasingly important to consumers. In fact, 80 percent* of those who classify themselves as frequent shoppers say they only shop with brands who personalize their experience. Campaigns applying deep personalization through clever geo-targeting and time-parting usually generate high engagement, although not widely used in the industry.
Improve first-party data collection
Implementation of data-capturing mechanisms helps ensure robust data is available as granular input for the targeting and personalization of users who have already engaged with your brand. Starting early is key because you might need time for data to build up before you see insightful information.
Why use IBM for cookieless targeting?
At IBM, AI is the backbone of our advertising solutions because we know how powerful and effective it can be. With AI advertising, you can analyze how a person behaves in the moment on a website. You can then use these insights to better anticipate their needs and preferences moving forward and put them in front of an advertisement they have an interest in.
The loss of cookies and other PII might be the best change that could happen to modern advertising. After all, cookies and other types of third-party data are often faulty, incomplete and unreliably sourced. Advanced contextual marketing cares less about past choices your customers and prospects have made and more about what matters to them at this moment.
