For the past decade, third-party cookies have been an extremely useful digital marketing tool – capturing data about website visitors while maintaining their privacy and, more recently, giving them full control over the usage of this data through opt-outs and deletion capabilities.
However, with consumer privacy concerns ever increasing, leading web browsers such as Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox have been forced to go on a diet – one that doesn’t include cookies. While the full impact of this shift is not yet known, it is expected that the absence of cookies will mean far less visibility in targeting, location, and measurement across devices and applications.
Apple will be enforcing similar data privacy measures with the release of iOS 14, which will feature prominent alerts that inform users about how their information will be tracked – from behavior to locations and more. Users will have to explicitly give consent for this information to be used across each application.
So how can marketers who are dependent on consumer data adapt to these changes? Here are three ways to mitigate the impact of cookie removal:
- Maintain your first-party data by promoting a meaningful value exchange for information, such as a personalized shopping experience
- Work with trusted data partners that have their own first-party data and/or quality, consent-based third-party data to continue to acquire new customers at scale
- Consider employing traditional marketing tactics in promotion and measurement, such as discount codes, vanity URLs and correlation analysis for pre/post-marketing activations
While no one wants to live in a cookie-less world, the above tips can help marketers adjust to the new frontier in data monitoring and usage until the industry at large develops a solution that effectively balances consumer privacy and personalization.
