Cookie reliance for marketers: What it looks like and how it will change

In the world of marketing, you have to avoid being complacent about how you connect with customers and potential customers. So, when an older way of doing things is supplanted by a technological innovation, you want to adopt the improved methods before your competitors can take advantage of the situation and start gaining more market share.

A case in point is companies relying on third-party cookies. In an era of enormous databases and machine learning tools that allow you to use artificial intelligence to manage the details in huge troves of customer information, it makes sense to consider new ways of connecting with the people who are interested in your products or services.

It’s useful to consider how marketers use cookies now and what marketing will look like in the future. Why have marketers been hesitant to embrace first-party data?

Third-party and first-party data

Third-party data refers to the information that other companies collect about customers, which you can buy for your company to use for its own purposes.

In contrast, first-party data is information that you collect from customers by yourself. You own and control this data, and the way that you gather it can be transparent making it a more suitable approach in a world where people are trying to claw back their privacy.

Google phasing out third-party cookies

With more requests from users to boost privacy protection, Google announced back in January 2020 that it will phase out the use of third-party cookies in its Chrome browser. Since Chrome is the most-installed browser on the planet, this is a major shake-up in the industry. The move follows Firefox and Safari, who were the first to put a stop to third-party cookies.

Individuals seek greater control over how advertisers are using their data. They want to improve privacy and are demanding transparency for how marketers harvest and use their information.

Today’s ecosystem of third-party cookies “generally allow businesses to track customers online without their knowledge,” as noted by a recent report from Street Fight. It noted that “Due to both restrictions by private gatekeepers such as Google and Apple and public regulations, that’s not going to fly anymore.”

Marketers have been hesitating to use first-party data

What is the reason that marketers have been slow to switch to a first-party data approach? For one, they often have to contend with data silos. The information they use is kept in separate databases that are hard to connect. This is a waste of data and capabilities.

And often, companies that are inexperienced in using huge amounts of data wind up adding more information to their system without allowing for proper context. If you don’t categorize information and arrange it into meaningful categories, it’s difficult to use it to arrive at actionable plans.

In some cases, businesses have limited information technology or IT departments and lack the needed equipment to handle the enormous amount of customer data they’ll be amassing. Furthermore, they need powerful computers to process the data in real-time.

Ideally, you will migrate your data from local servers to a cloud-based solution, such as the system developed by Lytics. That way, you can take advantage of an online platform to store and analyze the first-party data for better customer engagement.

In a survey conducted by Lytics in conjunction with Sapio, 51% of respondents say they plan to devote more resources to email marketing. Upwards of 92%indicate that using first-party data is becoming more crucial for their business.

About half of the companies are creating personalized content on their websites and using first-party data to predict the behavior of customers and develop more personalized emails to get out their messages more effectively.

What is a first-party data strategy?

With a first-party strategy, you will focus on collecting information directly from customers as they engage with you. This involves capturing their email addresses when they visit your website, for example, and paying close attention to what they say to you or about you to other people through social media channels, which you should always be monitoring for praise and criticism alike.

Google has released its Privacy Sandbox, using APIs for advertisers to target ads to customers even while keeping their identities private. As a result, you can advertise to specific portions of your demographic, but you would not actually access the sensitive data.

As you take in the new information, you’ll need to rely more heavily on analytics to better understand what your customers are doing and what they want from you. Machine learning helps you make sense of the first-party data more effectively.

Get help deploying a first-party data strategy for your business today

Lytics has developed a customer data platform that helps marketers achieve their goal of building personalized digital experiences to support direct, 1-to-1 marketing campaigns. The trick is in putting data together to get the most value out of it.

This is best accomplished with a cloud-based warehouse to keep your customer information safe and easy to manage. Our advanced knowledge of behavioral data and machine learning allows us to help brands compete at a global scale. If you have questions about transitioning from a cookie-based approach to marketing to make the move to first-party data, we have answers.