Marketers Caught Off-Guard: The Imminent Fall of Third-Party Cookies and the Rise of Multichannel Insights
A couple of reports last week highlighted that most marketers are unprepared for the loss of third-party cookies. In a YouGov survey published last week by Adform, just a third (33%) of marketers said they were ready for a first-party world.
This is fairly shocking, considering it’s not as if this should have taken anyone by surprise. Third-party cookies have been deprecating for years (some of Apple’s cookie restrictive policies predate Covid), so businesses have had plenty of time. This is even more the case, given how long Google have been stalling on blocking third-party cookies on Chrome. So now that that particular party is coming to an end, marketing and media teams should be much more advanced in their thinking than the survey suggests.
Marketers, and media businesses, are guilty of Micawberism – an over-confidence that “something will turn up”, so that they don’t need to plan for any change. As mentioned, in the context of how long this trend has been in play, this is a dangerous “head-in-the-sand” policy, and indicates a huge over-reliance on Google’s media ecosystem. If you are dependent on third-party data now, on most devices, it means that your long-term customer data is at least inaccurate, if not actively meaningless. This is especially the case if you have large amounts of mobile traffic, given Apple’s privacy strategies.
But more importantly, it misses the fundamental changes in the customer landscape. Having some inaccurate data in your only customer channel would be okay; after all, retailers dealt with this for years in a store-only environment. However, customers are truly multichannel. In truth, they always were, but since the restrictions of Covid forced everyone onto a single channel for a while, people have embraced whatever channel they want. In order to understand the customer, therefore, businesses have to create a multichannel picture of customer behaviour.
This is no longer a nice-to-have. For instance, consumers hate the idea of ads following around the internet, especially when they have just bought the particular item they were looking at, and which they were then retargeted with. For consumers, this is inexcusable, because consumers understand and expect their data to be joined up, and they know that if they see a repeat ad, this must be informed by data held by the business. This shows it’s not accurate, which is increasingly becoming a hygiene factor.
With data inaccuracy at every turn from third-party data, businesses have to understand customers in a first-party environment, and to join up the data across all channels. Not doing this will not only lose competitive advantage, it will actively harm the business.
So, marketers need to embrace multichannel customer insight, and use next-generation analytics tools, like Customer Analytics platforms like Adobe’s Customer Journey Analytics, to understand behaviour and integrate a range of data sets to enrich customer analytics. These can feed into media targeting platforms, like Adform, to drive media efficiencies.
But that isn’t to say that third party data sets are no longer relevant; they can be used to enrich data, just not the ones marketers have been used to. Open data sources, such weather data or demographic data, are often complex and can be messy and difficult to use, but if curated, cleaned and integrated in the right way, can provide highly valuable insights into regional trends and influence media planning and targeting strategies, as well as personalisation at scale.
That’s why we have created just such a data set, where we have cleaned and curated a series of data into an integrated data source that can enrich and augment your first-party customer behavioural data. Indeed, we are already providing insights that have informed geographic targeting strategies for clients.
Combining first-party multichannel customer data in your data platform with curated data to inform media and content strategies is a highly powerful approach to deliver personalised experiences.
Please get in touch to find out more.
Marketers look to third-party data to beef up activity – DecisionMarketing