Identifying Opportunities in a Cookie-less World
In Part 1 of this series, we explored the disruption and impact that impending policies around the restricted use or removal of third-party cookies are poised to bring to the digital advertising and marketing industry. As we stand at the cusp of this change, it is important to embrace a new paradigm.
This article will discuss where opportunities lie, aiming to minimize disruption in personalization & optimization, ad experiences, data partnerships, and visitor analytics.
Personalization & Optimization
- Personalization: Building first party data and maintaining a unified online domain
The significance of first party data has never been more evident. It is more accurate and more actionable. By harnessing tools like machine learning, different in-session algorithms can be built tailoring real time experiences for individual customers.
A pivotal facet of this approach is its device agnostic nature, increasing its effectiveness. Moreover, maintaining a single domain consolidates first party data, enabling seamless authentication and persistent identification throughout the user’s website journey.
Augmenting first-party data with people-centric identifiers, such user IDs or email address (or hashed values) is a way to reach personalization goals.
- Optimization: Crafting Probabilistic experience Journeys
Leveraging geographic, demographic, and behavioral data collected from first-party sources can help in building customer segments. These segments can be analyzed to determine who is mostly likely to purchase, drop, or go inactive.
Experiences can be tailored based on the behavior shown and segment attribution to optimize conversion in likely buyers.
Ad Experiences & Marketing
- Contextual Advertising: a Paradigm Shift
In the absence of historical third-party cookie data contextual advertising emerges as a strong alternative. By evaluating the current context and user actions, advertisers can analyze webpage or app content to deliver relevant ads. For instance, the topic or keywords on a landing page can inform ad delivery, aligned with the user’s immediate interests and behavior.
- Synergy of First Party Data, Offline Data & Machine Learning:
Combining user specific identifiers (like ID, email ID/hashed email ID, phone number) captured via first party behavioral data with offline CRM records and harnessing the power of Machine learning & segmentation can yield dynamic ad experiences. These experiences adapt to user preferences, grounded in real-time & offline data analysis.
- Forging Second Party Relationships: Unleashing Collective Potential
Establishing Second party relationships involves the reciprocal sharing of first party data through a mutual/contractual agreement (by dropping a container on the partner’s website or by exchanging files).
Particularly beneficial when businesses share overlapping customer bases, this approach facilitates enhanced segmentation delivering more relevant ad experiences. Consider scenarios where credit cards companies can collaborate with entities in the electronics, travel, and retail sectors.
Visitor Analytics
One privacy-friendly method, “Server-Side Tracking”, can be utilized to track user behavior. This method entails the tracking and storage of user behavior at the server level, eliminating the use of cookies.
Leading analytics tools like Adobe Analytics (Google Analytics & many more) offer Data insertion APIs that enable server-side tracking. Data collected in XML format is directly sent to Adobe servers, where it can be read and activated for various platforms. A unique ID is given to every new visitor based a combination of user agent, IP address, and other points.
Key capabilities include:
- Event tracking data- Clicks, Page Views, Form Submissions, Video Milestones
- API based data tracking & insertion- Tracking data for behavior on third party platforms
Conclusion
Embracing a new paradigm, characterized by server-side tracking, switching to first-party data collection, soliciting consent for data collection, and fostering second-party partnerships lays the foundation for navigating a digital world in the third-party cookie less era.
What’s next?
Stayed tuned for our next article: “Cookies less Visitor Data Collection”.
