Google’s cookie phase out: How are you going to cope?

By Robyn Scott on August 24, 2020

At the start of the year, Google Chrome announced a two-year wind down of third party cookie tracking availability on its hugely popular browser.

For many, this news may have slipped under the radar – but the importance of this change cannot be underestimated. This is a show-stopping shift in the world of online browsing that will have a demonstrable impact on brands, digital teams and technology businesses across all sectors.

What does this change mean? Brand loyalty is about to become more important than ever before.

Marketing teams will need to better understand their first party data if they still want consumers to engage with their brand in this new, cookie-less world. But it’s not easy. There are three core challenges that businesses need to overcome…

1. Talent

Marketing Directors and CMOs will need to make a conscious effort to hire data-driven marketers with an eye for numbers. They’ll need to be comfortable working with cutting-edge technology in order to better understand customer data. It’s not hugely dissimilar to hiring a team of data scientists…!

2. Less control

CMOs will also have to invest even more money into the walled gardens of Google and Facebook. This duopoly dominates the paid advertising market, with marketers about to relinquish even more control. Brands need to be able to sell more directly to their loyal customers, and use their most profitable customers as the ‘model’ to find many more like them.

3. Rising costs

The cost of paid media is only going to increase, and a key challenge for brands is to find a way to ensure they’re making every penny spent count.

Contextual-only won’t cut it in 2020 and beyond…

Customer behavior is changing at an accelerated rate. Choosing a contextual-only approach won’t cut it with the modern consumer. Customers are expecting more, so you need to know what they want, before they know themselves – in short, it’s all about predicting their next move and providing the ultimate customer experience.

How can artificial intelligence (AI) prepare brands for this new cookie-less world?

With an ever-increasing number of customer touchpoints, it’s becoming a greater challenge for marketers to get a handle on their data. Now, with the loss of third party cookies, change needs to happen – and it needs to happen quickly.

With the help of AI, CMOs, digital marketers and CRM specialists can regain control of their customer data and reap the benefits of this exciting new technology – the numbers in our case study with Footasylum speak for themselves!

By harnessing the power of AI to understand every customer’s interaction with their brand, marketers will have the insight needed to make more intelligent decisions and free up time for creativity. This will also directly impact short and long term business metrics such as new customer acquisition, lifetime value, purchase frequency and brand loyalty, to name just a few. With a sustained approach of personalisation over time, your brand will be stronger so ‘direct’ and other ‘brand-driven’ channels become more prominent any way.

You don’t need to retrain as a data scientist…

You may think your data isn’t ready for AI, but in our experience that’s rarely the case. Peak has built an AI System that gives businesses the ability to ingest multiple data sources via tools such as Google, social media CRM and ESP systems. Our team of data scientists will do the hard work, unifying and transforming your data, ensuring it’s ready for machine learning algorithms to be applied – so you can harness the power of AI in a matter of months.

Start taking more control over your customer data by starting a conversation with Peak – we’d love to hear from you.

See what AI can do for your marketing – check out some more resources below ?