Why these cookies can change your marketing forever.
Chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, snickerdoodle—we might still have holiday cookies on our minds (and our waistlines), but we’re talking about a whole different kind of cookie.
Last year, Google announced that their browser, which dominates more than 60% of the web browsing market, will end support for third party cookies by 2022. What is a third-party cookie, and how could this development affect your marketing strategies?
A third-party cookie is a piece of code placed on your website that sends user tracking information between your website and the creator of the cookie—usually social media companies, customer management platforms, and other tech partners. Cookies can provide you with valuable customer insights like the type of content your audience likes best or what they’re searching for online. Your marketing benefits when you can use that information to improve or tailor your content to your audience.
Facebook, Salesforce, and other common digital marketing tools provide businesses with third-party cookie tracking solutions that enable deeper insights into marketing strategies. However, this results in large companies holding a lot of your data, which many people are less enthusiastic about.
With the world’s largest browser dropping support for widely-used third-party cookies, like the Facebook Pixel, it’s time to reexamine your digital marketing reporting strategies. Without access to these tools, your business may lose access to important insights about your customers and clients.
Here’s how your company can ensure you’re meeting user expectations for privacy while retaining actionable digital marketing insights:
- Meet with a digital marketing expert to identify the key data points relevant to your business that could be lost when third-party cookies lose support.
- Consider developing proprietary first-party cookies that allow your business to capture only the information you need from web users.
- Automatic processes to share that more limited information with strategic marketing partners like Facebook, Salesforce and other CRM’s can also be built.
- Allowing customers or clients to pick and choose what information they share with you helps earn their trust.
- Ask a digital marketing expert about whether your marketing tool or CRM has any new first-party cookie options on the horizon. Companies like Facebook will be quick to provide new options after third-party cookies lose support, but other popular tools may not be able to provide adequate solutions.
In the digital sense, cookies are crucial to targeting your audiences and tracking the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. So sit down, grab a real cookie, and talk to us to explore new options for capturing valuable web visitor information.