Building first-party data strategy is the key to success in cookieless future: Fiona Tate

As third-party cookies make an exit, it is going to get quite challenging to measure marketing KPIs in the digital world as data around consumer behaviour on certain websites and several indicators of conversions are going to vanish. Marketers can’t be depending on blind luck to deliver their goals and they will have to look out for smart programmatic alternatives to deal better with the consequences in the post-cookie setup, noted Xaxis Senior Director of Operational Excellence Fiona Tate, while speaking at the first e4m Programmatic Summit. 

Tate said, “Whatever you do and however hard you work; unless you can’t measure what your client values, you won’t be able to hold their trust. As we move into 2022, our industry is facing seismic shifts. With the cookies going away, a lot of data, too, will be inaccessible. And we need to make serious adjustments to accommodate that.”

She suggested that clients must therefore be working on strengthening their skills and technology to accumulate solid first-party data. “It will now be imperative that any brand that wants to know how users are interacting with their websites or any of their online assets, needs a mechanism to track and store that data. This is first-party data and it will be invaluable in understanding how well the marketing budget is working.”

Tate further shared that this data may be limited to e-mails or a set of users that have interacted on a social media page, or it may be a full CRM data set, showing the life cycle of a consumer from first brand exposure to purchase and after-purchase care. "But of course, the rich the data set you have, the better position you will be in to understand consumer behaviour, both online and offline," she said.

A possible way to create this dataset, Tate recommended could be advertising within a ‘walled garden’, i.e, on platforms like Facebook & Google, which provide robust data tracking tools. “There is a tempting degree of continuity with the way in which activity can be measured using a walled garden. It's possible to continue to monitor people's activities and interests based on their behaviour within it and you can track their behaviour on your website, as well; thereby, giving you a complete picture of that user profile and their actions.”

However, she alerted that there could be some limitations around using this data as consumer behaviour might not certainly be the same across these platforms and a seller’s own websites. “Are you happy to ignore the customer base outside these walled gardens or should you be ignoring them?”

Tate also suggested brands and marketers, therefore, should constantly be looking at reinventing innovative solutions to capture and understand data. One of the ways could be to rely on a data connectivity platform that could merge and compare data for a set of consumers on these platforms and one’s own websites and other digital assets. 

She concluded by saying, “All of that can be achieved without the use of the third-party cookie and across more than just your digital advertising. What truly will determine the optimal, omnichannel marketing mix is the scale of testing that would be needed to get data of statistical significance and to what degree of granularity (we are able to achieve that). You can measure the effect of changes in your plans. So to get very specific answers to what is working for you.”