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.

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

The post Go Organic: Your SEO Strategy In The Cookieless World appeared first on NetElixir.

Deck the Halls Early with a Review of 2022 and a Web Refresh 

We can’t expect 2022’s holiday season to look exactly like 2021 – or 2020, or any pre-pandemic holiday season. But you can prepare your business for the unexpected by reviewing what challenges you faced last year and what tools and strategies might minimize disruption this year. While there has been an increase in first-time shoppers due to the pandemic, companies such as grocery stores that jumped on the online boom have found their margins challenged as the market shrunk. Businesses should innovate while staying focused on long-term sustainability and profitability.

E-commerce sales fluctuations have become the new norm, and in 2021 that meant that for the first time in over a decade, sales on Cyber Monday were less than those on Black Friday. We expect that customers will start their holiday shopping earlier, with planned, considered purchases that account for inflation and the supply chain slowdowns that continue to affect business. As patterns become harder to predict, the deprecation of third-party cookies means your business will need to find new ways to track customer behavior and report and analyze trends to notice fluctuations and react accordingly.

Has it been a while since your e-commerce site had a refresh? Whether your branding and content are out-of-date or your site could benefit from updated tech and a new e-commerce platform, now is a great time to think about user experience and web development and creating a frictionless journey for your customers. Consider supplementing your online presence by entering marketplaces like Amazon. Amazon and other marketplaces are likely to attract more holiday shoppers than DTC sites with discounts and early holiday deals.

Make Your Holiday (Customer) Lists and Check Them Twice with Google Analytics 4 and First-Party Data

If you haven’t already made the move to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), don’t wait any longer. Universal Analytics (UA) and Universal Analytics 360 properties will be fully phased out by October 1, 2023, and historical data for 2022, which is only held for 6 months, will be gone. By having GA4 up and running before the holidays, your business will be ready to track the important October, November, and December search-shop-buy behaviors that will inform your strategy not only this season but for years into the future. 

With third-party cookies disappearing, finding new ways to connect to customers and capture first-party data is critical to your business’s success. Use this time to create a loyalty program that will bring your customers closer to your brand and to find other ways to drive the customer recognition and connection that will encourage users to trust you with their data. Brands should consider investing in an  in-house insight labs or working with digital marketing partners to experiment with different strategies to reveal patterns and discover which strategic moves deliver the best outcomes.  

Create a Data-Informed Holiday Digital Marketing Strategy

With uncertainty a certain feature of holiday shopping this year, it’s never too early to plan for difficulties or opportunities that might arise. By taking the time to build out customer personas and develop SEO-optimized holiday content, when the unexpected happens (and it will!), you will have a back-up strategy that can be adapted to fit new circumstances and will avoid having to start from scratch. Save time and reduce holiday stress by designing contingency plans now, including messaging, for potential supply issues and other disruptions that might impact holiday buying and shipping in the months ahead.

Ready to Plan for Holiday Shopping? NetElixir is Here to Help.

At NetElixir, we are here for your business at every stage of your holiday planning. Whether your e-commerce site needs a facelift or an overhaul, whether you need help getting started with GA4 or a full-on support with track and reporting, we are here to support you as you prepare for the holiday shopping season. We’ll work with you on all your digital marketing strategy needs, from optimizing SEO to developing customer personas that help you reach your high-value customers and implementing the brand loyalty programs that will inform your content and campaign planning.

Additional Reading

• Our e-book: Preparing for a Cookieless World
• 2021 Holiday Readiness Resources

The post Christmas in May: Your Holiday Strategy in the Cookieless World appeared first on NetElixir.

A year ago, we suggested that it was time for e-commerce businesses to start thinking about making the switch to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for their tracking and reporting needs. Today, we at NetElixir are here to tell you that if you haven’t already begun ‌implementing GA4 for your e-commerce platform, the time to start is now. 

Why Should My E-Commerce Business Upgrade To Google Analytics 4 Now?

Google has announced that Universal Analytics (UA) will be phased out next year. UA properties will stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023 and Universal Analytics 360 properties will no longer process new hits starting on October 1, 2023. While summer 2023 may feel far off, in reality e-commerce businesses that use UA have just over a year to make a smooth transition.

By making the leap now, your business can immediately begin to gather historical data to support your digital marketing strategy for the future. If you begin using GA4 sooner rather than later, by the time UA is sunset – when many of your competitors will finally make the switch – your business will have had at least a full year’s data recorded and analyzed. You will be a step ahead for the 2023 holiday season! Your 2022 holiday data will have been processed and analyzed in GA4’s algorithm to better inform your future holiday strategies.

In fact, by using dual-tagging, it’s possible to begin building out your GA4 implementation while keeping your UA implementation in place for the time being. This allows your business to build that critical historical record while still accessing ongoing insights from UA. As you start to understand and use GA4 and its tools, you can compare and contrast the data collected and insights offered through both GA4 and UA to better recognize how patterns you have seen in UA might appear in GA4 in the future. When the time comes to shift completely to GA4, you can do so with confidence.

However, it is important to note that GA4 does not share e-commerce and event data structure with UA. The best practice for setting up e-commerce data collection in Google Analytics 4 properties is to have two implementations in place: one for UA and one for your GA4 property. We at NetElixir can provide flexible GA4 packing from core e-commerce events implementation to UA events migration to ensure your data is being accurately tracked, measured, and analyzed.

How Can GA4 Help My Business To Understand Customer Journeys And Events Across Platforms While Meeting Privacy Standards?

When UA was introduced in 2012, it had only been five years since the unveiling of the iPhone. Because e-commerce shopping and advertising were not yet the multi-platform experiences they are today, UA’s tracking was based on user sessions (most often via web browser) and used third-party cookie data to measure key data points such as conversion and attribution. 

GA4 is the most recent version of Google Analytics. Today, as customers move between email, web, and social media apps on their phones as well as browsing and communicating on computers, all with an expectation of privacy, it’s important that tracking captures each event in a customer’s journey. GA4 collects event-based data across platforms, assigning different categories to these events to better understand and analyze a customer’s activities and interactions with your brand. GA4 was designed with built-in compliance to GDPR, CCPA, and other regulatory developments, including the requirement that IP addresses must no longer be tracked. 

GA4 is an analytics tool built for the cookieless future that allows you to monitor web, mobile, and app analytics on a single dashboard. With a more in-depth integration system and audience list, users are afforded a robust understanding of the customer journey as well as more informed ads targeting. GA4 uses advanced machine learning for customer tracking across platforms and devices, with conversion modeling offering knowledge where the loss of third-party cookie tracking leaves holes. GA4 automates certain customer behavior insights, such as showing how changes in new customers’ activity connects to a rise in demand for a certain category.

How Can Netelixir Help You Succeed On GA4 In The Post-Cookie World?

Need some expert assistance getting set up with GA4? Whether your business uses Miva, Shopify, WooCommerce, or another standard e-commerce platform, NetElixir can handle the complete technical implementation of GA4. We offer professional setup of GA4 and support crafting website goals and conversion funnels. NetElixir can also:

• Create more advanced tracking for your business through customized tracking pixels.
• Upgrade your pixels to GTM or global site tag prerequisite for GA4.
• Perform post-implementation data validation and other setup-related maintenance checks.
• Institute best practices around reporting insights and tracking audiences and events‌.

GA4 can provide your business with valuable analysis from your customer data, and NetElixir can make sure GA4 is implemented across your e-commerce website to maximize its capabilities. 

Want to learn more? Request a consultation with our experts today.

Further reading

• Our latest e-book: Preparing for a Cookieless World
• NetElixir + Google webinar: The Future of Analytics and Thriving in A Cookieless World
• Preparing for the Cookieless World With Google Analytics 4
• Using Data to Guide Your Content

The post Google Analytics 4 & Cookieless Tracking: Why You Need to Upgrade Now appeared first on NetElixir.

Why Should I Consider Offering a Loyalty Program for My E-Commerce Business?

To boost customer retention and customer lifetime value, loyalty programs provide personalized offers and content that encourage ongoing customer engagement with your brand. Your loyalty program is both a method to collect key data to inform your marketing strategy and a distinct channel for direct, targeted communication with your high-value customers.  While effective incentives for allowing access to customer data vary by age and generation, free gifts, loyalty rewards, giveaways, and exclusive content are far less effective incentives for customers than discounts and free trial offers. Customers want to experience your brand at low or no cost, and they are willing to provide access to personal data like their email address to do so. A successful loyalty program is mutually beneficial, providing businesses with customer data that will help direct their strategy and presenting customers with valuable incentives that meaningfully impact their connection with your brand. Your loyalty program should be a smooth, curated experience for the customer that guides them through exclusive offers tailored to their interests. 

By collecting contact data points like email addresses and cell phone numbers, demographic and location information, and brand app and site browsing history, you can determine what products and services appeal to particular customers and connect with them about incentives. This data influences which offers and messaging you share to reach these customers across channels, from app push notifications and text messages to email outreach and social media ads. You can also use what you learn about your customers to build a strategy for reaching new customers with similar profiles. As third-party data disappears, developing loyalty programs and other means to capture first-party data will have a critical impact on your business’s ability to create effective digital marketing campaigns. 

During Google Marketing Live 2022, we learned that shoppers are 77% more likely to chose loyality brands over other businesses. Within the next few months, Google plans to showcase a brand’s loyalty benefits directly on results pages. Existing loyalty members will see what rewards they are eligible to use directly under a product or offer. Performance Max campaigns can use a customer match of existing members to find and target potential new loyality customers.

We foresee that loyalty programs will be especially important for D2C Brands competing against bigger industry players who resell their products. NetElixir’s Trends team has also found that Millenials especially value loyality programs and earning points through their purchases. Relying on key shopper insights and brand differentiators will go a long way to helping a brand succeed.

How Can NetElixir Help?

Two of the biggest barriers to businesses creating loyalty programs are competing priorities and lack of tech support, according to eMarketer. But with the death of third-party cookies, the data that can be collected through a loyalty program is more important to your bottom line than ever before. NetElixir has the experience and the resources to guide you in designing your loyalty program with analytic tools that will produce the customer insights you need to drive sales. 

NetElixir works with you to determine what data analytic options will be most useful for your business. Our proprietary technology, LXRInsights, is a powerful tool for tracking, analyzing, and targeting your high-value customers and engaging more like them. LXRInsights allows you to match unique user IDs to specific datasets about products particular customers are buying, including how often those customers are purchasing from your business. Loyalty program customers can maintain their privacy on your website and app while still allowing you access to useful data around their spending habits. LXRInsights also empowers you to easily retarget customers who are likely to buy from you again. 

NetElixir can lead the web development process for your business to make your site as customer-friendly as possible, and we can use the data you acquire through your loyalty program to develop customer personas and content that enables you to reach your high-value customers across all channels. We can help you partner with technology vendors to gather and use data in a manner that complies with industry standards around privacy such as adhering to customer consent choices and protecting customer information, while using advanced tracking to capture data on conversions. 

Contact NetElixir today to learn more about how we can help your e-commerce business succeed in the cookieless future.

Further Reading

• Our latest e-book: Preparing for a Cookieless World
• NetElixir + Google webinar: The Future of Analytics and Thriving in A Cookieless World
• Preparing for the Cookieless World With Google Analytics 4

Updated June 1, 2022

The post Loyalty Programs: Why Brand Allegiance Is More Important Than Ever appeared first on NetElixir.

What Are Cookies And Why Are They Going Away?

First-party cookies are all about improving the user experience for your customers. They ensure customers have easy access to usernames and passwords, items they’ve added to their shopping carts, language preferences, and other information that customizes your site for each user. These cookies are created by your site and its host domain.

Third-party cookies are loaded by ad servers and other third-party servers on websites, and they can be accessed by any site – including yours! – that loads the code of those servers. Accessing that code allows you to learn about customers’ browsing activity to help you better target them with your digital campaigns.

As internet users have gotten more and more concerned about privacy and access to their data, there’s been a push toward transparency and toward offering users control and choice over how their data is used and shared. With changes in regulations and user expectations, websites are beginning to limit how much they track visitors and customers to comply with stricter privacy measures. That means you can no longer rely on the wealth of information third-party cookies provided.

Why Should My E-Commerce Business Prepare Now For The Shift To A Cookieless World?

If your business is part of the 68% percent of the digital industry that, according to IAB, isn’t changing up their measurement strategies to adjust to the end of cookies, your e-commerce business may trail competitors who are already working to transform how they collect and analyze data. Successful brands will make the shift from third-party to first-party data that draws on their strong relationships with their customers.

In this rapidly evolving digital environment, businesses must be nimble and find new ways to collect and analyze data to inform decision-making and innovation. By collaborating creatively with marketers and tech experts, you can continue to offer dynamic, frictionless user experiences for your customers that lead to conversions while maintaining customer privacy.

What Can I Do To Ensure My Business Has The Right Strategy For The Cookieless Future?

As third-party cookies disappear, first-party data will become more important than ever in informing how you communicate with customers and how you personalize the content you share with them. If you have a strong following and a loyal customer base, research shows that your customers will be more likely to trust you with the data that will help you refine your strategy and user experience. Building brand loyalty and recognition can be achieved through thoughtful and authentic storytelling that creates a connection with customers. At NetElixir we expect that direct-to-consumer brands with an already built-in fanbase will especially find success through those direct relationships with customers. 

The tools available for data analytics in digital marketing continue to evolve, with Facebook, Amazon, and other platforms working on solutions to meet businesses’ needs. Google Analytics 4 is already emerging as an important industry tool that complies with privacy regulations while tracking data from events and audience creation. 

How Can NetElixir Help?

The disappearance of cookies doesn’t mean you have to abandon real-time data-driven insights! NetElixir can help you continue to reach your high-value customers across channels with targeted content to ease their path to conversion.

We at NetElixir are always thinking about how the digital landscape will continue to change, from our expectation that there will be increasing prominence for ad platforms with robust first-party data to anticipating the rise of equity-based marketing and the use of machine learning to streamline and automate best practices. We predict that using a full-funnel approach, rather than focusing on specific channels, will help to drive business growth even as engagement with individual channels changes.

We are already improving and innovating our analytics tools to provide you with the data insights you need to make decisions about your business. We’ve developed an Analytics and Insights Solution that brings together Google Analytics and Power BI with our proprietary customer analytics platform LXRInsights to help you collect and understand the customer data you need to inform your digital strategy. 

Want to learn more? This is the first post in a series on the future of analytics in a cookieless world. Check back for posts on loyalty programs, preparing for the end of cookies and understanding why third-party cookies are going away, and the future of cookieless tracking. And contact NetElixir today to discuss how we can help position your business for success. 

Additional Resources

• Our latest e-book: Preparing for a Cookieless World
• NetElixir + Google webinar: The Future of Analytics and Thriving in A Cookieless World
• Preparing for the Cookieless World With Google Analytics 4

The post Tracking & Reporting in a Cookieless World appeared first on NetElixir.