or a long time, many online marketing activities were based on third-party cookies, not only but especially in advertising. For many years, this created a comfortable mood in marketing departments: It made it easy to implement cross-website and personalized marketing. And why shouldn’t that still be a good thing? At the moment, the topic is undergoing massive legal and technological change, which requires a rethink and adjustments in the MarTech stack.
In the truest sense of the word, it’s a tricky situation: A mix of data protection, technological evolution, and user behavior will soon bring the abrupt end of the third-party cookie. Even today, according to various estimates, 20–35% of users are not tracked properly at all. What that means for performance measurement probably doesn’t need explaining.
At this point, we can only touch on the complicated legal situation. In addition to the much-discussed General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which already caused a “cookie quake” when it was introduced, the EU’s ePrivacy Regulation is also just around the corner. It should actually have been applied long ago. However, the EU has not yet been able to reach an agreement, so it likely will not come into force before 2023. More info on the ePrivacy Regulation here and here.
Back to the GDPR. Most recently, an Austrian ruling caused confusion and concern in the industry: according to it, even the Google Analytics tool so beloved by marketers is said to violate the GDPR. In addition, the French data protection authority CNIL confirmed the ruling (More information on the ruling here and here). This does not inevitably result in a ban on Google Analytics, but it feels like a warning shot for the marketing industry.
Of course, this whole development does not pass the target group by without leaving a trace. The topic of the GDPR has been widely discussed in public. Even if many people still click “Agree” out of convenience, awareness of data protection is growing. Ad blockers have long been part of some users’ repertoire. Private or incognito mode in the browser is no less popular. Retargeting measures and personalized advertising are often described as “creepy”. With all the targeting and tracking options available, you have to be careful not to do marketing that ignores the human being. Tracking is not an end in itself; it needs to be embedded in a comprehensive communication strategy – in terms of content as well as technology.
There are already tracking methods for targeting in advertising that work without cookies. They partially solve the problem of cross-device tracking – however, they have some weaknesses, as explicit consent from the user is often required or the lifespan is not particularly long. Here is a list of current technologies:
Fingerprint tracking
Semantic targeting
ID tracking
eTag
Advertising IDs
Authentication cache
Google Topics API
The currently best approach seems to be: companies need to become “masters of their data” again and focus on first-party data. Many of the alternatives mentioned above are more like crutches. But for well-founded, data-driven marketing that feeds your own MarTech stack with the right data, given the current situation there is no way around ushering in a shift in data collection.
You might be asking yourself right now: “First-party data sounds all well and good—but how is all of this supposed to work?” Luckily, the MarTech industry is evolving so quickly and is so agile. As a result, there are already a number of technological solutions that can help you with the data challenge—on the one hand with collecting the data, and on the other with managing it.
For managing your first-party data, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a great option. A CDP standardizes your company’s customer data from your various systems and channels: CRM, newsletter tool, e-commerce systems, website, call center, and much more. The trick is that a CDP intelligently consolidates and cleans the data. This gives you a holistic picture of a customer and their interactions (purchases, subscriptions, support calls, etc.) with you.
Till Zier is CPO at Matchilla and, as a MarTech expert, reports in MatchZINE on news and trends in marketing, automation, analytics, and data.
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