By collecting first-party data, your e-commerce business invests in critical information that will shape your communication with customers, from what channels you use to how you personalize your content. Research suggests that customers are more likely to share their data with companies they know and trust, so building brand loyalty and recognition is a must. Brands which employ thoughtful storytelling and creative, on target content can build a devoted following. 

Incentivizing the Collection of First-Party Data

Your e-commerce business can collect first-party data in a few ways. One is simply to ask customers directly for key information, including contact data points like email addresses and cell phone numbers. When a potential customer accesses your site, makes a purchase, interacts with your brand on social media, or clicks on one of your ads, you can suggest that they provide their contact information and even ask that they answer other key questions useful to your business. Feedback forms and help request interactions are another possible collection method. You can increase data sharing by offering incentives, from coupons for a percentage off an order to exciting giveaways to entry to an exclusive community. Paid lead generation ads and campaigns can help generate new leads on potential customers who might appreciate your brand. 

Other data points such as demographics, location, and app and site browsing history can be collected by implementing first-party cookies and cookieless tracking options. This data can help you decide which products and services appeal to certain segments of your customer base and determine what offers and messaging you share to reach these customers across channels, including app notifications, text and email outreach, and social media ads. Understanding your current customers will help your business develop other strategies to reach new customers with similar profiles. 

Best Practices for First-Party Data Collection and Use

• Be transparent and build trust. Most websites, to comply with regulations and meet customer expectations around privacy, now include cookie consent notices. Make sure that these notices disclose what data you’re tracking and how you’ll use such data. Stay on top of changes to privacy regulations and keep your customers informed about any changes to how you collect, store, and use their data.
• Offer quality content and incentives. If you want to build loyalty for your brand and develop a customer base that will continue to support your business for years to come, make sure the content you create is relevant to your customers and the incentives you offer are worth the trust your customers place in you.
• Meet customer expectations. Whether you offer a free gift, a discount, or special access to exclusive content or product, make sure you follow through on your commitments to your customers in a timely fashion. 
• Develop personalized content and strategy. If you’re going to go to the trouble of collecting first-party data, use it to offer your customers a brand connection tailored just for them. From targeted email campaigns and ads to an improved user experience across channels, first-party data can help you develop a digital marketing strategy that will draw in your high-value customers. 
• Refine your data collection. As you continue to collect data and find new ways to engage with customers, you’ll learn more about which methods connect you with high-value customers and which generate customer leads that don’t translate to sales. Make sure your business focuses its efforts on collecting actionable data, and don’t hesitate to shift your strategy when you notice changes to effectiveness.

How NetElixir Can Help

NetElixir’s experts can work with you to develop a robust first-party data strategy. Whether your business’s web presence needs an overhaul, or you need to update all of your content and optimize your SEO, or you need support upgrading to Google Analytics 4, NetElixir’s team can set you up for success. We’ll help you develop a digital marketing strategy that will drive sustainable growth and customer engagement across diverse social channels. We’ll work with you to test ways to reach new and existing audiences, and our hands-on, knowledgeable team of analytical thinkers will work to find innovative solutions to meet your business’s needs.

Ready to Learn More?

Contact NetElixir to discover how we can help your e-commerce business leverage first-party data to inform a digital marketing strategy that will deliver results for your business.

Additional resources

• The Role of Marketplaces in the Cookieless Future
• Tracking & Reporting in a Cookieless World
• How Consumer Privacy Expectations Are Shifting

The post Deep Dive into First-Party Data: How to Collect it and Use it Responsibly appeared first on NetElixir.

To prepare for the cookieless futures, brands are taking the time to refine SEO to improve search engine result page (SERP) rankings, find new ways to build customer loyalty, and collect first-party data. But it’s also critical to consider how to leverage existing sources of connection with your customers to optimize your advertising strategies. If your e-commerce business already has a presence on a marketplace like Amazon – or is considering creating marketplace stores – this is a great time to make sure your marketplace strategy is solid and delivering results. That means optimizing your content for discoverability, taking full advantage of the tracking and reporting marketplaces offer, and accessing and analyzing any first-party data marketplaces like Amazon make available to your business.

Maximize and Optimize Content for Marketplaces

Having a store on Amazon Marketplace is a great way to improve discoverability for your products and your business. But to be successful, your product content needs to rise to the top of SERPs outside the marketplace and to the top of the results within the marketplace. If you want to beat out your competitors for customers, your SEO and customer experience need to be on point, from insightful, on trend product names and descriptions, to how fast your images load, to the language you use for your ad campaigns. You need to keep your product metadata up-to-date and timely to ensure your products can be found and highlighted by Amazon’s and other marketplaces’ search algorithms.

Tap into Marketplace First-Party Data

If you are already an advertiser on Amazon, you are well aware that Amazon and other marketplaces have a wealth of first-party data on their — your — customers. By tapping into this data, your business can better connect with shoppers who are searching for products like yours. Amazon offers advertisers tools to track, measure, and optimize campaigns to get their products in front of exactly the right customer. While access to this data and these tools for non-advertisers may be more limited, it’s important to understand what resources are already available to you as a business with a store in the marketplace. 

Prepare for Cookie Replacements from Amazon and Others

The digital marketing ecosystem is always evolving, and players like Amazon and Google are actively searching for ways to track and analyze customer data that don’t rely on third-party cookies and do comply with privacy regulations. Amazon Web Services is working with a global advertising technology company, The Trade Desk, to implement Unified ID 2.0 (UID2) as a cookie replacement, and Google is developing a privacy-first web approach through their Privacy Sandbox that should allow marketers to reach consumers with targeted marketing across Google’s platforms. As an e-commerce business, staying up-to-date on industry developments will allow you to take advantage of new tools as soon as they’re released and keep ahead of your competition.

NetElixir is Here to Help

NetElixir’s e-commerce experts are ready to work with you on all your marketplace needs. With 18+ years of e-commerce experience, we know what will make your business stand out as an industry leader and set you on the right path. Our marketplace marketing framework draws on our 10+ years driving predictable and profitable results and gaining actionable insights for our clients.

NetElixir’s team of strategists will establish and expand your Amazon presence to drive profitable growth for your business. They use an integrated approach to provide you with the content, technical know-how, and real-time optimization needed to ensure the success of your new marketplace.

NetElixir’s experts can help with every aspect of marketplace marketing, including:

• Store design: NetElixir’s experts will build your customized store from the ground up to support your business objectives and growth goals. We’ll work with you on everything from product title and description optimization to product management and customer review engagement. 
• Analytics: Our expansive suite of analytics tools helps identify opportunities for your brand to get in front of the right customers at the right time. We stay on top of industry research, insights, and trends to offer you customized recommendations for featured and sponsored products to draw in and convert customers. 
• Ad management: NetElixir offers full-service ad management for Amazon and for the Walmart and Instacart marketplaces. We’ve worked with hundreds of clients to optimize their long-term and short-term ad campaigns for sustainable growth.

Contact NetElixir today to learn about our services for Amazon and other marketplaces. 

Additional Resources

• Web Development For the Cookieless Future
• Smart Cookies: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence
• Who Killed the Cookie? A History of Third-Party Cookie Deprecation
• Watch Now: Marketplace Strategy: Winning on Insights

The post The Role of Marketplaces in the Cookieless Future appeared first on NetElixir.

But if your business has already taken action on these big picture concerns, you can use this extra time to dig into more granular e-commerce website optimization. User and customer experience is critical to converting and retaining customers. The easier it is for your customer to navigate your site to find (and purchase) what they’re looking for, the more likely it is they’ll return to do so again and again and become one of your high-value customers. That means you should always think about what adjustments you can make to ensure your website is user-friendly.

As privacy regulations have increased and consumer expectations around privacy online have shifted, e-commerce sites have added privacy notification pop-ups and banners to allow customers to understand what first-party data is being tracked. From there, customers can opt to accept or reject the use of certain cookies. A smart design for these notifications can help ensure that customers stay on your page and allow you to access their data, while a poor design might see customers closing your site before they’ve even started to browse.

Web Development for Privacy Notification UX

Ever since the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was put in place in May 2018, it’s become a regular occurrence to see a privacy notification pop up when you first visit a website. Some are unobtrusive, while others won’t allow you to view the site until you’ve reviewed and accepted or rejected the terms. How these cookie notices look, and what options they present, can be informed by the type of site they’re gracing and what kind of information that site needs to track. Understanding what a business needs from its cookies is key to making decisions about the design of privacy notifications.

Some sites have little need to track their users and only require essential cookies, while other sites might need what could be called non-essential cookies to even function. These “non-essential” cookies may be connected to certain plugins that have been used to build or modify the site. Other sites may want to encourage users to allow “non-essential” tracking because the data collected can have a big impact on the business’s success with customers as well on the customer’s experience. Whether you are refreshing an existing website or building a new one, making sure your website is user-friendly — right down to the privacy notification that greets new customers — is critical as we move toward the cookieless future. 

Best Practices for Cookie Consent Notice Design

While your privacy notification has to meet the needs of your e-commerce business, here are a few high-level principals to keep in mind:

• Aesthetics: Your privacy notification should be unobtrusive, streamlined, and easy to read.
• Prioritization: Prioritize the essential cookies your business needs and the data it needs to collect to make your business a success, and keep the non-essential cookies to a minimum.
• Functionality: Make it easy for your customers to review, accept, or reject your terms as needed, in as few steps as possible.
• Clarity: Build trust with your customers by providing clear information on what data is being tracked and how it will be used, while still keeping the notification as streamlined as possible.

How NetElixir can help

At NetElixir, we live by the motto, “Say No To Average”, and that’s especially true when it comes to web development. Your web presence is where your customer interacts with your business, and no detail is too small and no challenge too big for our team at NetElixir. Our web development experts can work with you to build a new e-commerce site from the ground up that is ready for the cookieless future, or we can help you ensure your current site is up-to-date and ready to go by the time deprecation is complete. We have over 18 years of experience creating sites that are tailored to customers’ needs, and we will work with you every step of the way. Learn about our web development services today and contact NetElixir today to learn more!

Additional Resources

• How to Optimize Your Website With The Latest Digital Marketing Trends
• Smart Cookies: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence
• Christmas in May: Your Holiday Strategy in the Cookieless World

The post Web Development For the Cookieless Future appeared first on NetElixir.

At NetElixir, our proprietary AI-powered digital marketing platform, LXRInsights, is a powerful tool for predictive analytics, from tracking customer journeys to forecasting which customers will return to make a repeat purchase to helping segment your customer base and identify high-value customers. By using AI to understand your customers, you can market effectively to high-value customers while offering a customer experience that will build brand loyalty and bring customers back to your site again and again. 

Tracking and Analyzing the Customer Journey 

A customer’s journey on an e-commerce site has many steps, from the first time they click through from a search engine list, an ad, or a social media post, to the moment they click submit on a purchase. By taking the time to track, analyze, and understand the first-party data collected during that journey, you can learn who your high-value customers are and which channels, touchpoints, products, and content are effective at reaching and converting them from a browser to a customer ready to make that final purchase. 

At NetElixir, we’ve found that high-value customers drive over 40% of revenue while accounting for only four to ten percent of the customer base. Marketing directly to this high-value segment of your customer base can have a huge impact on the growth of your business. LXRInsights uses predictive analytics and customer segmentation to help businesses find and target new high-value customers to improve your return on investment for each marketing dollar spent. 

LXRInsights helps your business find the answers to critical questions such as:

• Who are your high-value customers and what sets their search-shop-buy behavior apart from other customers?
• How many times does a high-value customer visit your website before making a purchase?
• What are the various channel touchpoints for your high-value customers?
• Which customers are likely to churn and which are likely to buy from you again in the next two months?

Targeting High-Value Customers and Improving Customer Experience with AI

AI tools like LXRInsights can help your e-commerce business use data to reach high-value customers and create a smooth customer journey that shoppers enjoy. Creating customer personas from the data gathered about your customer base can help your e-commerce business develop marketing campaign strategies aimed directly at the high-value segment of your customer base. AI can be used to predict what customers are searching for, what channels and touchpoints are the most valuable, and even to personalize the content – from ads and emails to product recommendations and loyalty programs – you use to reach key segments of your audience.

By understanding customers’ preferences, touchpoints, and shopping behaviors, you can target them at the right time, with the right product and right message, improving the likelihood that they will become a loyal customer while also creating a better shopping experience. AI can also ‌support the customer’s journey when a customer needs assistance, from feedback or request submissions to chat bots or a direct connection with customer service agents via chat or phone. At the end of the day, AI can be a hugely valuable tool to improve the relationship between customer and brand while growing your e-commerce business.

Ready to get started with AI?

Is your e-commerce business excited to leverage the power of artificial intelligence to inform your digital marketing strategy? Reach out to NetElixir to book a demo of LXRInsights today!

Additional Resources

• Go Organic: Your SEO Strategy In The Cookieless World
• Your Social Strategy For the Cookieless Future
• Christmas in May: Your Holiday Strategy in the Cookieless World

The post Smart Cookies: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence appeared first on NetElixir.

Use the extended time as a safety net to experiment with all available options and learn what works for your brand. Here’s what marketers should still be doing so that they are ready when third-party cookies eventually deprecate:

Adopt a Test-and-Learn Approach

There is no one-size-fits-all solution that will drive results for every business. Brands need to figure out what works with their audience, brand identity, core values, and more.

Experimentation is the key to a future-proof growth strategy, as you are continually learning new best practices, what doesn’t work, and what can be improved upon. Allocate a portion of your marketing budget to test out different channels that are optimized for the cookieless future. Consider solutions like streaming platforms, connected TV, and gaming, as well as experimenting with new content or a bigger budget on channels that already perform well to maximize your results. Be sure to consider your holistic growth strategy and see how each channel fits into your customer’s overall purchase journey.

Continue to make the most of Google’s current offerings. Google’s Performance Max campaigns are a future-proof paid search campaign solution and by August and September, Shopping campaigns will transition to Performance Max. We expect that 50% of the total paid search ad budget will be assigned to Performance Max campaigns by Q4 2022 and will progressively increase to 80%+ over the next 12 months from there. It is important to test and learn what works best for your brand now, as the 2022 holiday season will rely predominantly on Performance Max campaigns. Use the rest of Q3 to compile your baseline performance, initial tests, and top-performing assets. Performance Max campaigns leverage Google’s machine learning algorithms and strong content options to promote the best ad for each customer. There are three input signals that matter for Performance Max campaigns:

1. Campaign goals
2. Campaign set up
3. Creatives (content and design assets)

A critical success factor for Performance Max campaigns is setting the right signals from the start. Google’s machine learning algorithm builds off the initial signals added to the campaign to find similar audiences who will engage with your ad. Ensure you are feeding high-quality audiences into your signals with NetElixir’s AI-driven digital marketing platform, LXRInsights. LXRInsights combines with Google Ads to fill in the gaps of identifying your high-value customers — brand loyalists who spend three to five times more than the average shopper.

Google’s actionable insights and diverse content opportunities will strengthen your paid media campaigns by finding out what makes your customers click. LXRInsights will help Google target and engage higher quality customers to sustainably and profitably grow your brand. Leveraging AI to synthesize the best ads and audiences will allow marketers more time to strategize and make better decisions based on data and results.

One of the most important tenets for the cookieless future is relying on data-driven insights for better business decisions. Only through innovation and experimentation will you drive performance that sets you apart.

Update To Google Analytics 4

There is one deadline that is not changing: Google’s choice to sunset Universal Analytics in July 2023. If you have not already upgraded to Google Analytics 4, now is the time to do so. If you’re still using Universal Analytics, you will not be able to see YoY data for 2022-2023. Every day that you don’t upgrade is a day of data lost. 

A major benefit of GA4 is its predictive analytics regarding your customer’s likely online shopping behavior. GA4 offers more accurate reporting, cross-device insights, event tracking, and more to help you glean actionable insights from your website data. More reliable insights means you can be more confident in your business decisions.

Prioritize Your Customer Relationships

Consented, first-party data is some of the most powerful data you can collect to inform your marketing strategy. While we won’t need to rely on it just yet, having first-party data collection systems in place now will acclimate your customers to sharing their information with you and give you a headstart on building stronger, more meaningful relationships. Getting data now shows initiative that you already value your customer’s privacy. And the more you learn about your customers now, the better you can personalize your messaging, sales, and products to meet their needs. 

At NetElixir, we specialize in identifying, targeting, and winning high-value customers through LXRInsights. On average, high-value customers drive 3-5x more revenue than the regular customer. By leveraging Google’s AI capabilities to find and engage shoppers who are similar to your high-value customers, you can create a sustainable customer acquisition and growth strategy. 

Brand relationships are only becoming more crucial. Sharing your values and story in an authentic and transparent way will earn you meaningful customer engagement, especially among the younger generations. In your marketing strategy, continue to respect and prioritize customer’s privacy, as that is where the e-commerce landscape and consumer sentiment is inevitably heading. Hone in on customer values and expectations so you can be sure to retain their loyalty and already have first-party data to use when the third-party cookie finally crumbles.

Conclusion

In short, the delay of third-party cookie deprecation should not change any of the cookieless strategies you had been working on. Now, you just have more time to continue testing and learning what works best for your brand so you can be more confident in your solutions for the future.

Taking the steps now to future-proof your business will help your brand navigate any and all opportunities and challenges. Google may continue to postpone third-party cookie deprecation, but it is an eventuality. Preparing for that eventuality now will help you stay ahead of the competition with a robust strategy in place. As such, NetElixir will continue to update our Cookieless Corner with freshly baked insights to keep your strategy hot and ready.

Further Reading

• Your Social Strategy For The Cookieless World
• Go Organic: Your SEO Strategy For The Cookieless World
• What Are Audio Ads?
• Loyalty Programs: Why Brand Allegiance Is More Important Than Ever

The post What The Delay Of Third-Party Cookie Deprecation Means For You appeared first on NetElixir.

As marketers, we have to balance consumer privacy expectations with satisfying the needs of the brands we help. That means understanding what privacy means to consumers and what it takes to comply with privacy regulations so we can help brands meet those needs and expectations. But it also means doing what marketers do best – and what both businesses and consumers expect from us: getting the right brands in front of the right potential customers with the right message.

How Can Marketers and Brands Meet Consumers’ Online Privacy Expectations?

While some consumers understand that cookies and other data tracking can make their online shopping experience smoother and more relevant, they now expect to browse and make purchases online with more control over their data and more transparency over how it is used. Apple, Google, Firefox, and other companies are giving consumers more control over what data is shared, and well as how, when, and if it may be used. Marketers and brands would do well to follow their lead with their own data collection – and they need to be transparent with consumers about that data collection. Meeting these consumer expectations is one key step to building trust with potential customers. 

Marketers and businesses have to ensure their data collection practices meet regulations and laws, and we can continue to earn customer goodwill by going above and beyond to find new ways to deliver on protecting consumer privacy. Google is already pointing the way forward with their work on the Privacy Sandbox, which seeks to create a privacy-first web that still allows marketers to reach consumers with targeted marketing. As other industry leaders come up with similar developments, marketers must help businesses take advantage of these advancements.

How Can Brands Reach High-Value Customers While Preserving Consumer Privacy?

Privacy is important to consumers! But even consumers who want control and transparency around their personal data still expect a useful web experience. And businesses continue to want ads to be both relevant and timely to potential high-value customers. Marketers provide a service to both companies and to consumers by helping connect brands with the customers who actually want to buy their products. But with third-party cookies going away, it’s up to marketers to find new ways to make this connection happen.

While some ad tech companies have come up with tracking options that mimic third-party cookies’ ability to identify individual consumers — which may violate the spirit of consumer privacy expectations even if these options don’t run into trouble with regulations — Google has come out to say that once third-party cookies are gone, they won’t create “alternate identifiers” for tracking individuals across the web or for use in their products. Instead, Google is developing ways to create cohorts of individuals with common interests, as well as exploring how to use data stored on consumers’ devices to connect them with relevant content all while protecting privacy and identifying information. Chrome aims to give users more control over their privacy settings and we can expect other industry players to strive for this, too.

Developing strong relationships directly with consumers is one of the best ways to ensure a business can collect the data it needs to successfully market to its customers. Customers are more likely to consent to brands they know and trust accessing and storing their data, so making every effort to build that trust is in a business’s best interest. By taking steps like instituting brand loyalty programs and creating compelling content for web and social media, your business can reach new and existing customers and market to them directly with the products and services that will most interest them.  

How Can NetElixir Help My Business Meet Privacy Needs While Reaching Customers?

NetElixir stays on top of industry updates so your e-commerce business is always ahead of the curve. We’ll make sure your business is complying with privacy regulations and laws while taking advantage of the newest tools and opportunities to meet consumer privacy expectations while serving up digital marketing campaigns that will put your brand in front of the right customers. Whether it’s time to switch over to Google Analytics 4 so you’re ready for third-party deprecation, or you need a web presence refresh to make sure your UX is on point while complying with the latest regulations in your market, NetElixir is here to support you.

Ready to Learn More?
Contact NetElixir to discover how we can help your e-commerce business meet consumer privacy expectations while developing marketing strategies that will effectively reach your best customers in the post-cookie world.

Additional Resources:

• Go Organic: Your SEO Strategy In The Cookieless World
• Christmas in May: Your Holiday Strategy in the Cookieless World
• Navigating Apple’s iOS Privacy Updates

The post How Consumer Privacy Expectations Are Shifting appeared first on NetElixir.

When Cookies Began to Disappear, Social Media Took the Hit

While many marketers have only begun to think about cookie deprecation now, with Chrome set to phase out tracking by 2023, social media marketers saw the writing on the wall as early as September 2020. That was when the release of iOS14 limited retargeting capabilities for Facebook and offered users the option to ask the app not to track them, making paid social campaigns more difficult to run. Social strategists saw the window in which they could retarget users shorten from 28 days to 7 days, curtailing marketers’ ability to reach back out to potential customers and requiring marketers to totally rethink how they use social media channels for marketing. 

Finding New Audiences through Social Media Channels

Savvy marketers are beginning to see social media as a critical channel for reaching out and connecting with potential customers and building new audiences. Paid social is a unique data-rich environment great for testing products, promotions, and messaging across different audiences.  As the appetite for first-party data grows, marketers will need to develop paid campaigns that help them generate new leads of potential high-value customers who can become brand loyalists that have continued engagement with your e-commerce business. 

Lead generation ads and campaigns that focus on exciting offers, not just discounts, and promise community and exclusivity, can inspire new audiences to connect with your brand on social. A community on social allows you to access first-party data that will let you reach users not only on social media but also on other platforms. Digital marketers are now thinking more broadly about how a brand is performing and growing across channels with the recognition that the growth of audience and engagement in a channel like social can have a broad effect across other channels. By leveraging the strong points from each channel, marketers can build a customer journey that keeps the user engaged and ultimately converts them from a browser into a buyer. 

Reinvent Your Social Strategy with NetElixir 

Whether you’re ready for a total overhaul of your digital strategy for the cookieless future or simply want to dig into how your social media channels can support your e-commerce business moving forward, NetElixir will work with you to find the solutions you need to reach your customers. We’ll help ensure you’re telling compelling stories that will engage new audiences, using marketing psychology, and our brand and data-driven insights to understand and influence customer behavior. We can help you devise and execute your first-party data collection strategy to ensure sustainable growth and engagement of your customers, as well as leverage incrementality for holistic growth and test new channels to reach new and desired audiences. Our hands-on, knowledgeable team is made of analytical thinkers who love to create and share knowledge and to innovate in the e-commerce. 

We’ll use our proprietary social media campaign framework to help you find, target, and engage the perfect customers for your brand. We’ve invested over 500,000 hours developing social media campaigns on Facebook/Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Pinterest from initial design to final implementation. We’ll work with you to develop an authentic brand voice that helps your customers identify and connect with your business across all your social media channels. And while you’re creating content for your social campaigns, why not let NetElixir help you take a good look at your SEO strategy and make sure it’s meeting your requirements for the cookieless future and get your e-commerce business set up with Google Analytics 4 for all your tracking and reporting needs. 

Ready to Learn More?

Contact NetElixir to discover how we can help your e-commerce business put together a social strategy ready to target new audiences in the post-cookie world.

Additional resources

• Christmas in May: Your Holiday Strategy in the Cookieless World
• Preparing for the Cookieless World With Google Analytics 4
• Crafting an Effective Social Media Marketing Strategy

The post Your Social Strategy For the Cookieless Future appeared first on NetElixir.

For years, first- and third-party cookies were critical to personalizing user experience. They have been at the heart of the digital marketing and advertising ecosystem, tracking users across platforms and collecting data that e-commerce businesses analyze to inform their marketing strategies. But as internet, and especially smartphone, use has turned ubiquitous in our lives, consumers have become increasingly aware of how much of their personal information is tracked and shared, and their privacy expectations have changed.

How Have Governments Reacted to Consumers’ Changing Privacy Expectations?

Consumers increasingly want to have control over what information of theirs is collected, for what reason, and why – as well as how that information is shared. As these expectations have evolved, governments have weighed in. By May 2018, the European Union’s Member States had fully implemented the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which put into place certain rights and regulations around personal data in the EU. By 2019, the EU’s top court determined that users have to consent to all analytic cookies when browsing a website. This immediately changed how websites with an EU presence could capture and report on data, and it changed users’ web experiences. You’ve surely noticed that many websites now ask you to consent to the use of cookies when you first visit them.

The EU’s regulations have had a ripple effect outside the EU, but there are also US regulations being put in place around data privacy. The California Consumer Privacy Act, for instance, which was implemented in January 2020, regulates how personal data is collected, held, and shared, and what must be disclosed to the consumer about those processes. As other state and national governments react to consumers’ desire for increased standards of privacy, restrictions and requirements around how data is tracked and used are only likely to increase – which is why the once omnipresent third-party cookie is on its way out the door.

How Have Google, Apple, and Other Companies Reacted to the Slow Demise of the Third-Party Cookie?

Companies like Google, Apple, and Firefox have been both proactive and reactive when it comes to changes in privacy. As early as August 2018, Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection got rid of cookies on their browser, and by September 2019, Safari Intel Tracking Preventions 2.3 release was blocking all third-party cookies. 

Google announced in January 2020 that Chrome will phase out of third-party cookie tracking by 2023, and it has been developing an initiative called the Privacy Sandbox that hopes to bridge the advertising gap while adhering to privacy standards. With Chrome controlling nearly half of the US web browser market share (49.42%) and over half of the global market share (62.78%), changes to Chrome will have an outsized impact on the digital marketing landscape. It will become increasingly difficult to target customers with precision and personalization, to measure, report, and optimize campaigns, and to attribute and understand the path between an ad interaction and conversion, using the same methods digital marketing professionals have been used to employing. 

What Does the End of Third-Party Cookies Mean for My Business?

It’s been a good run, but the time has come to find new ways to gather the information your business used to collect through third-party cookies. If you want to continue to reach your high-value customers, don’t wait until Chrome closes the door in 2023 to come up with your new strategy. Make the leap to Google Analytics 4: it’s a tool built for the cookieless future, and that future is coming more quickly than you think. 

Going forward, organic search will be more important than ever, which means focusing on search optimization so your content is fresh and relevant. By curating great content and offering a thoughtful loyalty program, you can encourage customers to engage with your brand, trust you with their first-party data, and even become the brand evangelists you’ll need to grow your business. In the transition from third-party to first-party data, it’s inevitable that there will be some gaps in your reporting, but thoughtful conversion modeling and analytics can help keep your strategy on track. And as new tools and initiative’s like Google Privacy Sandbox are developed and come online, your strategy will need to continue to evolve. 

NetElixir is Here to Help

Are you ready for the cookieless future? NetElixir can help ensure your business is prepared for what’s ahead. Our experts will work with you on everything you need, from transitioning to GA4 to creating and executing a first-party data strategy to finding and engaging customers. We’ll support you as you design marketing plans that will reach your target audiences on platforms like Facebook, marketplaces like Amazon, and key search engines, even without the third-party cookies you’ve relied on for years. We can help you shift from winning average customers to winning high-value customers.

Additional resources:

• What You Need To Know About Performance Max Campaigns
• The May 2022 Core Update: What to Expect
• Christmas in May: Your Holiday Strategy in the Cookieless World

The post Who Killed the Cookie? A History of Third-Party Cookie Deprecation appeared first on NetElixir.

Cookies have historically offered businesses a streamlined approach to reaching consumers across sites and platforms with targeted paid ads informed by customer data. As third-party tracking will soon become a tool of the past, connecting with customers through ads on their favorite sites or apps and at the top of their search results will no longer be as dominant a strategy as it has been. Paid ads will begin to move from individual user data-informed efforts to models like Google’s Performance Max campaigns, which use automation and audience signals to reach multiple audiences.

Businesses can continue to track and report on customer spending habits by updating to Google Analytics 4 and ramping up efforts to collect first-party data through brand loyalty programs and other initiatives. But as third-party tracking is phased out, and with changes to privacy laws, regulations, and norms regarding what customer data is tracked, your paid search strategy will need to evolve to continue driving results. What does this mean for your business? Organic search and SEO are more important than ever.

How Does The Shift To A Cookieless World Impact SEO? 

Search engine optimization (SEO) has always worked alongside targeted ads as an organic way to introduce customers to your e-commerce products and services. Successful SEO helps your business to stand out from its competitors. Search engines like Google are constantly refining how they process pages to serve the most relevant content to users; Google algorithm updates, including the May 2022 Core Update, often inspire changes in best practices for SEO. 

The shift away from cookies does not constitute a change in best practices so much as it suggests doubling down and committing more resources to consistently refining and updating your content. As other channels become less reliable and third-party tracking becomes obsolete, optimizing content so consumers find your products and services organically through search engine results will be necessary to ensure revenue growth. 

What Should I Do To Update The SEO Strategy For My E-Commerce Business?

If you haven’t already dedicated time and budgetary resources to SEO, consider this your wake-up call. Invest in your content optimization and market research so Google’s algorithms identify your products and services as the most relevant to users searching for related keywords and topics and ranks your site or marketplace listings at the top of their search engine results pages (SERP). Focusing on your organic presence and moving away from the kind of paid ads that require a steady flow of third-party data that will soon dry up will create sustainable growth for your business.

In the past, paid search and paid ad channels could seed interest in a brand, but e-commerce businesses will now need to develop new ways to build brand awareness and find and engage loyal customers. When reviewing your e-commerce content to optimize it for effective organic search, be sure to:

• Reduce crawl errors by determining if all of your links work and updating those that don’t so your pages can be indexed by search engines.
• Refresh on-page content, FAQs, and blogs so your site is informative and uses relevant, timely keywords and language.
• Update structured data to ensure Google and other search engines find critical microdata to inform their search result displays.
• Prioritize user experience (UX) by confirming your core web vitals are on point with a site that is mobile-friendly, loads quickly, is visually stable while it loads, engages viewers, and is easy to navigate.
• Check out your competitors’ websites and marketplace listings to see if there are improvements you can make to yours to keep your offerings more competitive and appealing.
• Nurture your social media accounts to increase organic traffic and searches for your brand. 

How NetElixir Can Help

NetElixir can work with you to create an SEO strategy that will draw organic traffic to your business through optimized content. We will help ensure that the right customers are checking out your business and engaging with your products. With our AI-driven SEO platform, we will work with you to determine the relationship between user intent, topics, and keywords to better refine your content strategy and drive more qualified traffic to your site. Our SEO experts will collaborate with you to design engaging user experiences with compelling content that will push your site to the top of the SERP. If your site needs a refresh to improve UX, we’re here to support you with our web development services.

NetElixir stays current on search engine algorithm updates so your SEO strategies are always on trend and miles ahead of the competition. Whether your business uses marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart or you sell directly to consumers, NetElixir is here to make sure your ideal customers can move from search to final conversion seamlessly. Learn more about NetElixir’s SEO expertise and services. 

Additional resources:

• SEO Strategy to Responsibly Engage Your Customers
• Blog Optimization Strategies
• SEO Advantages to Your CMS Platform

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