Marketers Successful Measurement Without Third Party Data

How will personal data protected by privacy laws affect your business?

Understandably marketers are concerned about the effectiveness of their campaigns without access to third-party data. We’ve known for some time that collecting personal data comes with many risks.

Cyberthreats have motivated businesses to change their customer data capture requirements. For example, instead of collecting customer credit card data for online payments, most sites use third-party payment gateways.

Using specialist external providers extends beyond financial and personal data too.

Businesses now prefer to outsource employee management, and with a more flexible workforce, using online recruitment sites for hiring freelancers removes the need to collect and store personal data.

While having next to no data on their workforce and customers is a scary thought for many businesses, it’s coming sooner rather than later.

Privacy Law

GDPR is the global benchmark for managing the collection of personal data.

All websites and organizations should follow the principles:

• Be lawful, fair, transparent
• Collect data for legitimate purposes only
• Minimize what data is captured
• Keep data only as long as it’s needed
• Make sure data is accurate
• Data kept private and secure

Marketers have to move on without third-party data collected from cookies. Gartner predicts 65% of people will have their data protected by privacy laws.

Google, in their article, says marketers need not worry about the lack of customer insights currently available from cookies.

Without third-party cookies, marketers can focus on improving their website tags for accurate measurement from first-party cookies.

Value-First Marketing

There is some work to do, and Think With Google lets you know exactly what to do with your first-party data.

For example, building strong and lasting customer relationships. The time has arrived for marketers to shift the focus of their marketing campaigns from selling to providing value first.

You will know from your actions that you’ve got no reluctance to share information with your trusted suppliers and favorite brands you trust.

Value-first marketing includes:

• Discounts on new orders
• New product samples
• Loyalty and referrer programs

Your customers are your fan base and a fundamental part of your community. Therefore paying it forward with marketing campaigns that build up loyalty and brand reputation will grow your sales.

There are many ways marketing initiatives can improve customer discovery for without the need for third-party data. For example, use your blog, social media networks, and email marketing to pay it forward with relevant, engaging, and converting content.

Acquiring Consent

Google says getting consent to capture customer data requires the following:

• Use fun ways to share your privacy policies with customers
• Give to get – give something of value in exchange for data
• Full transparency and access – customers can manage the data they have shared

Collecting First Party Cookies Data

Marketers are shifting from using third-party data to tailor their campaigns to relying on website data and other customer interactions. One task needed is expert management of website tags.

Where your site is collecting visitor data, ensure you have the correct privacy permissions. Plus, you’ll need good tagging infrastructure – which can also be managed with tools, e.g., tag manager.

Also, Google’s global site tag will provide data from its Adwords and your site conversions.

Server-side tagging is also another Google tool that you can research online.

Blogger, Neil Patel has some sound recommendations for marketing without third-party cookies, including:

Market Research

Use market research powerhouses to gain audience insights.

Market research has evolved with AI powered market research platforms available on subscription. What terrifies marketers is the time it may take to churn data from different first-party sources like emails, social media, SMS texts, etc.

Artificial Intelligence is now the workhorse doing the legwork to crunch data and present accurate results quickly and in user-friendly formats, including charts, flow diagrams, etc.

Contextual Based Advertising

Without third-party data presenting relevant adverts to visitors will be more challenging. Neil suggests using contextual-based advertising, which is close to the website content.

The theory goes – if a visitor is on a page on your site, they likely got there from a keyword search, and if the content-based advert matches the content, it is deemed a match for the visitor.

Final Thoughts

For marketers, collecting data for audience-targeted campaigns is evolving. Google is phasing out third-party cookies from late 2023, therefore, it’s time to test how marketing will be effective through the use of other data sources.

For more reading, you may be interested in the privacy sandbox.