Getting ready for change in cookie world

It's inevitable. By about 2023, third-party cookies will be gone, thus hindering marketing campaigns, specifically understanding metrics such as key performance indicators, or KPIs, and return on investments, or ROIs.

Third-party cookies are tracking mechanisms that help marketers understand a user's profile on a website that's placed by an outside program.

I want to emphasize that first-party cookies will still be available to you. For example, a first-party cookie is when a user signs into an ecommerce website, like Amazon or Walmart. The web browser will send a request in a process that provides the highest level of trust that the user is directly interacting with Amazon, Walmart or another ecommerce website.

Here is a deeper explanation by cookiepro.com: "The web browser saves this data file to the user’s computer, under the “amazon.com” domain. If first-party cookies were blocked, a user would have to sign-in every time they visited, and they wouldn’t be able to purchase multiple items while shopping online because the cart would reset after every item that was added."

So how do we prepare for the change?

Well, for one, collect the data you can now by doing an audit. Find out what you can about visitors to your website.

But don't worry if you can't collect all that information. First-party data will still be available, like I mentioned before. A great example of this are lead generation forms, such as email newsletter signups or purchases.

Putting a greater emphasis on customer experience will be big going forward. Create a positive experience so a consumer, in confidence, can provide you the information you'd like to collect to help with your marketing efforts. But also be transparent about it. Tell them why you're doing it and what you plan to do with it.

Another thing to keep in mind, put a great emphasis on engagement, such as cost per clicks or CPCs. That will help you collect first-party data.

Google Analytics, for the most part, won't be harmed in this transition. But if you do cross-tracking tactics, that will go away. What you can do there is making sure you set up quality UTMs (Read more about that here).