After a years-long “will they or won’t they” dance, Google has finally decided to walk back its plan to depreciate third-party cookies. So…is this good news for advertisers and marketers? For some, it’ll probably be a relief not to have to change tactics, but this may lead to bigger problems eventually.
Technology has advanced to the point where you can easily personalize the entire customer experience, and customer expectations are keeping pace (especially with companies like Apple and Mozilla already stopping support for third-party cookies). While you aren’t going to be forced to adapt to a cookieless future with Google, you will need to keep up with customers who value data privacy and control. Let’s explore what you should do in light of Google’s decision.
What Does This Mean for Your Strategy?
With all the hemming and hawing from Google on third-party cookies, you may be confused about what to do with your marketing strategy. Should you stick with third-party cookies or move away?
First, a quick primer on third-party cookies. When you visit a website, a third-party service like Google generates a unique cookie that’s stored in your browser. Only Google can read this cookie. Later, when you visit a different website, Google checks if its cookie is already there (from the first site). If it is, Google updates your visitor profile with the fact that you’ve now visited this second site too.
Because of this, third-party cookies are useful for allowing (for example) Google to identify users across websites. This expands the amount of information Google has about the user and allows advertisers to use that data for more precise ad targeting. For example, an advertiser can use third-party cookies to target people who are interested in traveling for the next five days. Since Google can see a user go on three different booking sites and read a blog about the best way to get to the airport, Google can stitch together that cross-domain activity to confidently say that a specific user is probably going to travel soon. That level of precision is easy to achieve with third-party data since it covers a wider range of browsing behavior.
However, the data generated by third-party cookies can be risky to rely on — you don’t always know if the data is good quality and accurate. Additionally, you never know if Google will change its stance again on third-party cookies later, which means over-relying on this strategy can be harmful in the long run.
But how can you build accurate customer profiles without third-party data? This is where first-party and zero-party data come in. Going back to the travel example, a travel brand can run high-level prospecting ads on its site, and once a user visits and filters trips for the next five days, this becomes part of the audience segment for additional targeted ads. While an advertiser might not know a user has read a blog about airport logistics, the advertiser might use other on-site signals to segment users.
With a unified data strategy, you can use first-party data to create similarly accurate profiles without having to rely on third-party cookies.
To learn more about the benefits of first-party and zero-party data, here are some helpful resources to guide you in your strategy moving forward:
- The Importance of Zero-Party Data — understand the differences between zero-party, first-party, and third-party data, as well as why zero-party data is key to personalization
- Combining Zero-Party Data and Customer Loyalty in a Cookieless Era — see how zero-party data can help you boost customer loyalty more effectively
- Beyond The Cookie: Harnessing Your First-Party Data To Identify Your Best Customers — learn how to use first-party data to segment your customers using our quick start guide
- A Winning First-Party Data Strategy for Ecommerce — get helpful tips on how to incorporate first-party data into your strategy
Enriching Your Strategy With AI
Of course, just because there’s no major shakeup with third-party cookies doesn’t mean you should sit idly by and let inertia take the wheel. As mentioned earlier, technology has greatly advanced since Google first questioned its stance on third-party cookies. With the rapid rise of AI, marketers are now equipped to personalize like never before.
Bloomreach’s Loomi AI is a powerful solution embedded in all of our products, allowing you to accomplish more with your first-party and zero-party data. Let’s dive into some of our AI-driven use cases.
Creating More Complete Customer Profiles
There’s no better way to know what your customers want than by hearing it directly from them. You can gather information by asking customers questions on your app or website, then use AI to take that zero-party data and automatically create relevant incentives.
You can also use feedback surveys after key moments (e.g., after their first purchase), as well as track customer loyalty and satisfaction, to inform AI-driven predictions that improve the overall experience.
Discovering New Audience Segments
Being able to target the right customers is a powerful way to drive revenue in a more cost-effective way. Third-party data is incomplete at best, and what’s more, advertising networks (which rely on third-party data) usually won’t give you any of their collected data for further usage outside of the advertising network. This means you need first-party or zero-party data to create more relevant segments and personalize your campaigns on other platforms.
With Loomi AI, you can predict each customer’s probability of purchase and automatically segment them into high, medium, and low probability segments. Loomi AI can also segment based on return patterns, allowing you to suppress marketing to serial returners and avoid wasting marketing spend.
To keep customers coming back, try using Loomi AI to automatically segment based on loyalty, both for “soft” indicators like brand loyalty and customer satisfaction as well as “hard” indicators like revenue per visitor (RPV) and conversion rates.
Serve More Targeted Ads
Paid advertising is the biggest beneficiary of Google’s reversal on third-party cookies due to the sheer volume of ads being served to shoppers. However, it’s by combining customer profile data with AI that you can deliver more precise targeting and save costs.
For example, you can use Loomi AI to create lookalike audiences based on your high-value customers (more specifically, based on lifetime value or purchase intent for these customers). This will help lower customer acquisition costs (CAC) and improve ROI. Another way to lower costs is to use Loomi AI to identify customers who purchase low-cost items, and then sync this data to platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok to create more effective profit-focused ad campaigns.
With an all-in-one platform like Bloomreach Engagement, you can use omnichannel strategies to boost your ad campaigns. For example, you can send your customers an email or SMS campaign first (which costs less than paid ads). If they don’t open your email or SMS, then you can target the same customer with relevant paid ads, helping you save costs by needlessly sending ads to people who would’ve opened an email or SMS instead.
Connecting the Entire Customer Journey With Data
While advertisers and marketers might be understandably nervous about moving away from third-party cookies due to the amount of data they get access to, you can still use first-party and zero-party data to create tailored experiences at scale.
Our customer data engine helps address this data volume problem by allowing you to bring in all of your data — CRM, website, mobile app, offline, and more — into a unified single customer view. You can combine this with your product data to power seamless personalization across any touchpoint, resulting in more impactful campaigns than third-party cookies could ever provide.
So, third-party cookies may not be going anywhere (with Google, at least), but that doesn’t mean you can go back to relying on an unreliable source of data. Learn how Bloomreach can help you deliver successful ad campaigns with the power of AI and first-party data.
