Cookieless world: the new norm of tracking

Welcome to the new age of data-driven e-commerce!

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Welcome to the cookieless world. Cookies, pixel tracking, and other forms of tracking are becoming increasingly irrelevant. If you’re still tracking with cookies, you’re leaving money on the table.

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We are entering a new era, an era where cookies are disappearing and CDPs are taking their place. If you have been working with marketing, cookies have been the mainstay and go-to tracking system for years and years. But that time is over. And this blog will dive into what the new era of a cookieless world looks like.

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The death of third-party cookies and privacy

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What does it mean for a third-party cookie to die? It means customers are becoming more aware that data collected from their online browsing is used to create detailed profiles about them. And they don’t like it.

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The rise of first-party cookies is partly due to new regulations and laws around data privacy. But also because consumers have become increasingly concerned with how their personal information is being used by marketers. As such, e-commerce stores will need to find new ways to gather information without violating consumer expectations or running afoul of regulators.

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There is a growing demand for tools that help businesses protect customer privacy. We move toward a post-privacy world where users have only limited control over how their data is collected and shared by companies with whom they interact online (and offline).

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This has led to the development of better ways of collecting customer insights while protecting the integrity of these insights through encryption or tokenization methods like masking email addresses with an asterisk symbol (e.g., janedoe@*mailaddress*.com). This is done in order not to be easily identifiable within databases containing millions upon millions of records. Records about individual people’s activities on websites across all industries around the globe. Your’s included!

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What does the cookieless world mean to your business?

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So what does the cookieless world mean to your business?

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• It means you need to move away from cookie-based tracking. Now is the time to switch to first-party data and adopt other tracking options like browser fingerprinting and device identifiers. This means focusing on user experience since you have a different way of identifying users that requires better engagement with them.
• You should update your reporting and attribution model so it can make sense of data from multiple sources. Instead of looking at cookies or beacons, try using PII (personally identifiable information) in reports instead—it can give you more accurate results because it’s more aggregated than traditional analytics tools were built for. Especially those built before social media was around.
• Get ready for a major overhaul of your tracking system; if not implemented already then definitely plan on doing so soon because privacy regulations are coming into effect worldwide soon with stricter policies being adopted by regions such as the EU with GDPR. Others, like California with the CCPA, are another example. So make sure those systems are up and running before they go live!

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The importance of first-party data

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First-party data is the information that you collect on your users, like tracking a user’s actions and then using that information to infer something about their preferences.

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This is important because it allows you to understand what the user has done in the past. This naturally makes it easier for you to make predictions about how they will act in the future. The advantages of this are quite clear: It allows us to offer people better services by tailoring them more effectively. Thus resulting in increased engagement and monetization opportunities.

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The disadvantages are also quite: cookie tracking can cause problems for users’ privacy if they don’t consent or aren’t aware of its existence. However, as long as you follow best practices like obtaining consent for ad retargeting before setting up any cookies (or at least telling them), most people won’t mind being tracked by their favorite websites. At least as long as those sites provide value with their content/services/products, etc. And did you know that 83% of consumers are willing to share their data to create a more personalized experience?

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Building a customer data platform for the post-cookie world

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The post-cookie world is here, and if you are not prepared for it, now is the time. I am going to be pulling back the curtain on how our e-commerce customer data platform (CDP) at Custimy can help you understand your customers and make sure you aren’t wasting money on the wrong channels.

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Our CDP combines three different pieces of technology to help solve the cookie issues: first, we have a unified data warehouse where all your historical data lives. Then we have an analytical tool that consolidates and give analyses of the data for you; finally, there’s a layer of machine learning that builds predictive models off of all the other layers of information in our system.

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This means you can take data-driven actions based on all your owned data directly from our platform. This way you keep on a single source of truth that allows you to have precise insights into what your customers look like. But it also gives you better knowledge of how your overall business is doing.

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Mastering first-party data is more important than ever

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So, if you want to master first-party data and take advantage of the growing importance of third-party techniques, it’s time to have a customer data platform.

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In a nutshell, CDPs are platforms that combine all of your customer information into one place so that everyone can access it seamlessly within their own systems. They’re essential for building digital transformation strategies because they let you collect all the data in your organization and make better decisions based on it.

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The result? A richer experience for customers across every channel—from mobile apps, email systems, and websites to chatbots or voice assistants. All that increases loyalty by providing them with relevant content at every touchpoint in their engagement with you.

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Your CDP also acts as a hub for sharing this valuable information with other departments like product management (for segmentation), marketing (to create targeted campaigns), and even customer service (to know which customers are most valuable). One centralized data platform ensures alignment across teams. It streamlines workflows; reduces costs; improves efficiency; provides actionable insights into customers’ behaviors; teaches behavioral trends about individual consumers over time so businesses can tailor offerings accordingly.

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A cookieless world requires a new approach to tracking and analytics.

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If you’re still wondering what the heck a “cookieless” world is, then let me explain. It’s not that cookies are going away entirely. At least, they won’t go anywhere any time soon. But more that third-party cookies will become irrelevant.

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To understand why this is, we need to have a look back at how tracking and analytics have evolved over time.

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The early days of the web were all about getting your website in front of as many potential customers as possible. This was done by buying banner ads on other sites or doing direct email marketing campaigns. These tactics worked because they were based on very simple data: an email address or URL where users could be found online.

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E-commerce stores could get their message across by sending an ad in an email blast or placing it next to related content elsewhere online (for example, if someone visited a travel blog looking for tips on packing lightly). They didn’t care if people opened their emails; they just wanted to reach them with their offers wherever they were browsing online. So there was no need for any sort of tracking technology like cookies at all!

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How to survive in cookie less world with a CDP

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We are now entering an age where cookies once again mean less. But it is not because they aren’t needed. It is because consumers have bigger privacy concerns than ever before. So how do you solve it?

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It starts with first-party data and a customer data platform.
A platform like the one we have created at Custimy runs entirely without using cookies. Instead, it is built around device and user identifications. This means, we can track the user without using cookies, but rather with transactional information and other identifications.

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All these are first-party data-based, meaning that they are given with consent from the users. This allows you as an e-commerce store to know that you are working with high-quality data and at the same time respect the user.

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It also means you won’t have to be depending on using cookies. And that is key if you want to survive in a cookie less world that is coming very soon

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