In the post-COVID-19 market, online marketers and merchants are facing many challenges. The impending loss of third-party cookies is one of these challenges that online merchants prepare to face in the future. Because of an end to third-party cookies, many online marketers plan to shift their advertising strategy in the future. This change in digital marketing strategy will come into play in the next couple of years.
As the major search engine and marketing platform, Google will stop putting out digital adverts targeted to a certain person based on their browsing history. Besides this, the company will disallow private cookies to gather customer data on its Chrome browser.
By the year 2023, Google has decided to do away with tracking cookies on its search engine. The company has instead planned to give more priority to user privacy. Moreover, it plans to use a group profiling system in the next few years to use the browser without major privacy concerns.
In a digitized world where the average internet user spends hours on online platforms and social media, privacy is critical. Therefore, Google’s decisions and future plans are laudable. However, this also creates a gap in customer insights and data-driven marketing for digital marketers. This may impact both eCommerce sellers and Amazon FBA Prep companies like SimplFulfillment who leverage on cookies.
Not only Google but other major tech companies are also moving away from tracking cookies. For example, from April 2021, IPad and iPhone users have been opting out of tracking apps that were earlier used to monitor user browsing history and other activities. On the other hand, the recent regulation of the EU on digital cookies classifies them as a type of online identifier. This also makes the digital cookies subject to restrictions that seek user permission before placing these on browsers to track user activity.
These developments prove to be a hurdle for digital marketers and online businesses that depend on third-party data for marketing and lead conversion. Most companies depend on customer data and market insights for targeted advertising. Without third-party cookies, their marketing activity and efficiency will suffer to a grave extent. The new changes in digital policy for search engines and tech solutions are a massive change for digital marketers. Online marketers regroup their strategy after these changes come into full effect is something to watch out for.
There are an array of potential solutions to the future issues that will arise after these changes happen. Firstly, brands and online merchants need to rethink technology and align their marketing strategy with new technology. This will enable them to exercise more control over product information and customer data. Many tech pioneers like BigID have designed new-age data intelligence platforms to help online marketers achieve the goal.
Companies cannot completely do away with data-driven advertising and marketing. Customer data is the most necessary aspect of targeted advertising that has dominated an online audience that is demographically diverse. Companies need to store data and keep track of what they have and where they have. This helps the stakeholders in leveraging customer data for effective marketing.
What Else Is Off The Table?
Don’t we all wonder how we think about buying a particular product, and the next day related suggestions for the product pop up on our browser. This is because most cookies track the Internet Protocol or IP address when we conduct research related to the product. This has made the EU state that user consent is essential to place cookies on a user’s browser. However, this has divided the online scenario. While many browsers are doing away with cookies, some retain permissible cookies to drive their revenue.
Market insiders believe that an end to cookies may be a temporary problem for online marketers. The end to cookies may start a new chapter for more direct marketing from brands. Industry insiders believe that the brands will shift focus on building an engaging relationship with their customers. This will help the brands in getting more first-party data. Brands may also change to second-party data marketing strategies.
Under the second-party data structure, the company will know the status of the first party. The marketer may enter a partnership with another company to get better customer profile results. The biggest challenge is to find a viable alternative to the absence of cookies. One of the solutions to this may be a unified consent tool for the users. However, this idea is far from implementation today. We are a few more years away from when such technology is perfected and put to commercial use.
Many of the website operators look at the alternative of subscription service instead of free advertising. Paywalls are already beginning to take root over the online scenario and will only grow in a few years.
There are opinions that if the website operators cannot use cookies to get money from advertising, they will get their money from the users on their own. This will be a drastic shift because most users will have to adapt to the change. Currently, users are used to freeing the internet and free digital services. However, the above IT solution puts a price on these services, eventually hurting the users’ pockets.
What The Future Holds
Although there is a two-year window for the cookies to make a permanent exit, the timeline is not long enough for a viable solution to come out. The advertising and marketing communities need to conclude collectively. Secondly, the new solution cannot follow the same path as the cookies. The industry has to honor the regulation framework it exists in today. Therefore, the stakeholders have to take care of user privacy rules to a greater extent. However, when this solution emerges is not a surety because all new tech solutions are in the trial phase. The entire community has to find more than one solution to accommodate this change so that the industry can function at different levels.
