Post-Cookie World Opportunities
How browser cookies violate your privacy?
The website sends and stores a unique identifier to your browser and tracks your activities. This information will help a website to remember you.
Most browsers only allow websites to store a maximum of 300 cookies and 4096 bytes per domain.
For example in Facebook, when you want to add “like or share” functionality to your website, you need to add blocks of code to your website to communicate in Facebook servers. This will allow Facebook to know more about the user and listen to their activities.
Facebook uses several cookies to track user sessions, chat sessions, third-party applications, analytics, etc. This piece of information is being used for ads and campaign optimization. You can check advertisers' information in facebook “settings” and the menu, select “Ads”.
Using this piece of information they were able to categorize users for marketing targeting and segmentation.
It was 1996 when first reported that cookies could potentially invade our privacy after Netscape communication created it in 1994. For almost 25 years we still faced the same issue until web giants like Apple released their iOS 14 privacy move and Google Chrome to remove support for third-party cookies.
First-party cookies are created by the host domain — the domain the user is visiting. These types of cookies are generally considered good; they help provide a better user experience and keep the session open while the Third-party cookies are those created by domains other than the one the user is visiting at the time, and are mainly used for tracking and online-advertising purposes.
There will be a big paradigm shift in the digital landscape and the advertising world will be challenged.
What’s next to digital marketing?
Measuring the impact of marketing is always been a challenge especially with the recent and upcoming changes in our internet ecosystem, but we can start leveraging the first-party data. Here are some of the common strategies that I believe will rise in the post cookie world:
- Contextual targeting / Interest-based advertising. This is the process of placing ads on relevant websites in the Display Network. Google’s algorithm will analyze the content of web pages to determine its main theme, then matched to users keywords, language and location, browsing recency, and other factors.
- Analysis with combined data from other data sources. This is one of the most used data mining techniques. Discovering hidden data and make assumptions using the combined data sources such as census, weather data, domain knowledge, and other available data sources.
- Audience creation and site-wide tagging. Google Analytics and Google tag manager works hand in hand on this. Google tag manager can listen to user activities like page views, button clicks, link clicks, scroll depth, opt-ins and send this to google analytics to create an audience segment.
- Customer segmentation in Email Marketing. Purchasing behavior, customer journey, customer reviews, interest, loyalty, engagement level, demographics, user status are some examples of customer segmentation. This strategy continues to deliver a strong return on investment.
There might be some challenges in terms of measurements and attributions but we can continue to form sustainable strategies to optimize the customer experience without depending on third-party cookies. Like Arthur Schopenhauer said,
“Our task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.”
