Cookie acceptance pop ups might be driving us around the bend, but since the requirement to ask permission was introduced a couple of years ago, businesses and marketers have built their marketing strategies and systems around them.
Now things are all about to change again. It might have been predictable, but with Google telling us that 48% of consumers actually stop a purchase if they don’t trust the company to collect and manage data on them, it’s no surprise that Google are following the likes of Apple and Mozilla, and have announced that they were stopping third-party tracking in 2023.
This leaves businesses having to reset their marketing strategies, relying solely on any first-party data they hold, with many businesses, particularly in e-commerce, having to go back to more traditional marketing and brand building, but in a more digital world than before.
Any that fail to do so will find themselves simply giving their marketing keys to the tech providers with no real insight on their client base.
The option of doing nothing is a dangerous one, yet whilst Pimento research tells us that most marketing professionals intend to ‘do something about it’, 19 out of 20 acknowledge that they won’t be prepared for the great switch off.
Marketing will no longer be about stalking people across the web. We now have the opportunity where digital marketing can mature to become a real weapon to help brand building in a more meaningful way.
So, what’s the action plan? And what should all businesses, large or small, be lining up to do right now?
Action 1.
Do the gap analysis now. Work out what you currently use and need to achieve marketing penetration, and what will you have post the demise of third-party cookies. That’s the gap that needs filling.
Action 2.
Focus on the business infrastructure and get back to basics.
If you need support in doing the analysis, and in building the strategy going forward, make the move now to find it. Closer to the time, resources will be limited and remedial time scales will be longer.
Action 3.
Cement the data you have and get your consent strategy robust for the future, building the new approach around it. Undertake a cookie audit now.
Action 4.
Take a relook at customer experience and contextual for scale, so that you stay completely in touch with your customers’ buying triggers in the post cookie era.
This isn’t just a marketing challenge. It impacts the whole business spectrum, from SMEs to multinational corporates. Mid and large corporates will use their in-house resources to reposition, but small businesses will struggle in the absence of teams they can fall back on, and budget.
Pimento is well placed to be the surrogate team to look to though. With over 200 independent marketing agencies, covering most marketing disciplines, bespoke solutions are close at hand irrespective of size and sector.
This is not an issue for selective blindness. Businesses who fail to act will see their markets slowly dwindle away.
When you think about the negative connotations surrounding the word “persuasive”, you can understand why a lot of us in the industry are afraid to use persuasion to influence the customer journey.
We’ve seen this first-hand. Brands will avoid persuasive design as they are under the impression it uses “dark patterns”, which is a term used for a type of design that manipulates the unassuming customer into completing a call to action for financial gain.
This is simply not the case.
Persuasive design is not about manipulation, it’s about catering to your users’ best interests and anticipating the needs of your customers from discovery to purchase. You are essentially guiding your customer to make a decision that will, in the end, be beneficial for both you and your customer.
In short. Throughout the entire customer journey.
Once you understand the different types of customers that could be attracted to your services, you should use persuasive design or “nudges” across various parts of the online experience to subtly steer their judgment resulting in a successful conversion.
You should always try to make the customer journey simple… but not too simple. You want to create a seamless experience, but you also don’t want to illicit self-defeating behaviour, as this could impact customer retention.
If you’re still unsure how to use effectively use persuasive design, there are four key elements to think about when designing a journey your customers will not be able to stay away from.
A persuasive experience is more than one linear journey. Customers can connect with your brand in more ways than ever before, and you need to see each initial interaction as an opportunity to build a rapport and create an emotional response.
Failure to recognise these points of interaction leaves you with no indication of how your customers are feeling before, during, and after they complete their journey.
Whether your customer begins their journey through Google Search, social media, or even through a newsletter you should always map and follow the customer journey to see if and/or when their emotions change.
In just one journey a customer can fluctuate from excited to frustrated, or from hopeful to disappointed, and a map will allow you to see what caused these sudden changes. With this information, you can add positive reinforcements to parts, which caused the greatest emotional response.
If you wanted to keep a high retention rate, sending a “thank you” message or a reward to your customer after they’ve completed a purchase can be very effective.
For customers that you want to reassure, you could add a “final check” before purchasing, which allows them more time to finalise their details.
Persuasive design is not about deceiving the customer, it’s about helping them reach their desired end goal in the quickest and most efficient way.
There’s a great deal of truth to this, especially for eCommerce brands, as almost every customer will use the website that allows them to successfully complete a purchase in the shortest amount of time.
To ensure the transaction process is kept to a minimum, brands need to allow users to feel they are in control by stepping aside and giving the user the freedom to do what they want.
For this type of journey to be successful, your usability and UX hygiene needs to be on point! Slow loading speed, illegible fonts, and too many advertisement pop-ups can dramatically decrease your conversion rate.
You should always run thorough tests into what is not working on your website and fix it quickly before your customers turn to your competitors.
At the end of the day, your users are not just a number, they are human beings with ranging emotions and needs, and if you don’t grasp that concept then opting to use persuasive design is pointless.
The needs of a person looking to book a summer holiday abroad are going to be different from a person looking to take out a loan, so we can’t expect their experiences to conjure up the same needs or emotional responses.
When it comes down to it, the main reason your persuasive design will fail is if you haven’t anticipated your customers’ expectations or considered how you can cater to those specific expectations.
The more you can tailor the experience to your customers’ goals, needs, and frustrations, the better the retention rate.
Take the time to research your customers and use this data to create core personas, which will help you design a more targeted customer journey. If you don’t have these personas in mind, your design won’t be relatable to your desired users, and will not trigger the emotional response you desire.
When thinking about persuasion there are three things that are applicable to all brands: USPs, reassurance and incentives.
To start you need to show your customers what makes you unique and more appealing than your competitors. To do this you can highlight your benefits clearly on your website, so users will be able to quickly understand your value.
Next, you need to reassure your customer that you are the best option. If users do not trust you, then they will not convert. To demonstrate your value and trust as a company you could include positive customer reviews, ratings, third-party testimonials, and logos from trusted payment providers on your website.
The final thing you need to consider is including some form of incentive, and this could be the difference between losing a customer or successful retention.
When customers feel like they are getting something for free, they are more likely to complete a purchase and buy from you again. For example, offering free delivery or a gift if they spend over a certain amount will always be an enticing offer.
While the idea of persuasion and persuasive design may sound deceptive and difficult to get right, the reality is that this form of marketing is all about trying to understand and empathise with your customer.
When you understand what makes your users’ tick you can create a seamless customer journey that meets their needs. Once you have achieved this, what follows is a customer journey that users will trust and return to again and again.
It’s as simple as that!
If your attention span is anything like mine, it takes little more than the buzz of a phone to kickstart an afternoon-long procrastination episode.
One moment, you’re replying to a quick text. The next, you’re three hours into a doom-scrolling session that’s somehow left you four years’ deep in Gordon Ramsay’s Twitter timeline.
Of course, businesses know this about the general public. And advertisers are more than happy to capitalise on it. But in the golden age of social media, most businesses are missing the most basic trick in the book – a ‘distraction-proof’ website.
One of the dominant trends in web page building is the ‘omni page’. And it’s existed since the internet began.
Just as it sounds, ‘omni’ describes a singular webpage structure. And each page contains content.
But between relevant content, imagery, videos, copy which tries to hit certain word counts in a misguided attempt to improve SEO rankings, not to mention the input of internal business stakeholders who want to promote their own departments, websites are becoming increasingly bloated.
Often, each webpage ends up hundreds – if not thousands – of words long, and takes minutes, rather than seconds, to scan. With multiple menus, widgets and pop-ups, it all ends up proving distracting and frustrating for your visitors.
In essence, web agencies are being asked to include more and more content into every page of a website they’re building, often for the purpose of ticking certain boxes, rather than thinking of the user experience (UX). And the result is akin to building an entire website on every single webpage.
You’d think, given our doom-scrolling habits, that one long, jam-packed page of information would lend itself to today’s consumer. However, the complete opposite is true.
Research conducted by Microsoft has shown that we have an average of between 7 and 8 seconds to catch our website visitors’ attention. That’s because many – if not most people – are in the habit of scanning a page for information before reading the detail.
If you’re looking for a paper supplier for your business, and you need to know that they meet the right sustainability credentials, how long would you spend trying to find that information on a page that’s endlessly long, filled with videos, links to download a whitepaper on the merits of different paperweights, photos of the team, a social media widget and a few case studies?
My guess is, not very long.
Because, like most users, you’d probably rather visit a page that leads with the header ‘Your local sustainable paper supplier’, followed by a list of sustainability credentials.
Maybe you then see a link to ‘Our recent case studies’, which you could choose to visit and dive into more info, if you’re interested. Or perhaps you’ll explore the site’s menu to find out more about the team via the ‘About Us’ page.
But if your boss is breathing down your neck, and you’re performing a search for ‘sustainable local paper supplier’, the chances are you won’t spend more than those precious initial 7 seconds to find the right info.
Web agencies like ourselves aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed this trend of over-complicated page structures.
Google has also noted a large detrimental impact on page performance, particularly when it comes to how it the mobile device experience.
Google Page Experience is a new measurement for a webpage’s UX – specifically, how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value.
It includes Core Web Vitals – metrics that measure real-world user experience for loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of a webpage – and also includes existing Search signals: mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS, and intrusive interstitial guidelines.
What this means is if you want a webpage that’s built for SEO, it can’t be overstuffed with keywords – something we’ve talked about before. Any page you consider important for your business needs to score highly on these additional metrics and be valuable to your visitors.
In short: Don’t overstuff your pages with content. Only provide the information that’s truly useful to your customers, and you’ll gain the most value from your website.
It’s time to more thoughtfully consider what’s actually needed on each webpage. This is what will help keep your visitors focussed, engaged, and more open to valuable cross-selling and up-selling opportunities – without the opportunity for distraction.
Ready to talk more about how your website could more skilfully direct prospects through your sales pipeline? Talk to Proctors, at [email protected].
This world of search marketing, technical SEO and digital marketing can be one where we often see things made much more complicated than they need to be.
Have you been in meetings with talented and driven digital marketeers, talking the talk, crunching the data and churning out multiple sophisticated reports, yet you didn’t see any of this have a meaningful impact to your website’s performance?
At Varn, we see the challenge of SEO summarised perfectly by Einstein:
‘If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you probably don’t understand it yourself.’
In our view, the clever thinking and knowledge we apply to search marketing, must be grounded in simplicity.
Search marketing needs to be focused on carefully listening to a clients search challenges, understanding their users, getting immersed in what the competition is doing and making sure a website’s ‘basics’ are working. The task of getting to the top of a Google search can be made to appear so technically complicated and overwhelming, that clients can be blinded by terminology, tech speak and shiny free SEO tools.
We would like to see more smart thinking by simply trying to keep things straightforward and clear.
So here are our 3 areas to help simplify SEO efforts, so that search marketing becomes an activity that delivers results for websites and is not made over-complicated for the sake of making us all look terribly clever.
You can use as many free SEO data tools as you like, but this won’t really help you rank better for the most important keywords for your business. Good content is critical to a website’s SEO performance, so you must make sure you are creating enough quality keyword-rich content regularly.
This means developing a deep understanding of what your customers/users really want, what would help them, what they would love to know and what truly engages them. This will let Google know that you are answering searcher queries.
So get cracking creating user led content, be it regular blogs, podcasts, white papers, research to share, or video content that is designed to provide value to your customers. This takes effort, but stick with it and you will be able to create content that not only improves the website but also generates quality backlinks, which are very important when it comes to SEO.
For some more tips on content this article is useful: How to create great content that improves your site’s SEO (varn.co.uk)
Digital marketing teams can spend time, money and effort looking inwardly at the website analytics and data reports, which is important, but don’t forget to look at what everyone else is doing. A quick audit of your competition can provide a valuable insight into what may be working in your industry and highlight some things you need to change.
If your competitors are hot on optimising their website and content for SEO, then you should be too.
It can be very common to protest “Our competitors are not as good as we are, yet they rank better than us?”. That’s because Google will crawl your website, crawl your competitors’ site and will rank them based on how well optimised the pages are for specific keywords. So unfortunately, Google simply doesn’t know if you really are better than your competitors and doesn’t take into account how much better your product may be compared to theirs.
If you want to be seen in a search, above and over your competitors, then make sure you compete with their website too.
SEO is such an important part of this, so make sure you optimise everything from your home page to how you are appearing on Google Maps for location-based searches.
It’s incredible to think how much effort can be spent talking about SEO, yet the actual construction and hosting of a website can be forgotten. You should always be looking to improve the usability of your website and site speed is such an important part of this.
Ultimately, site speed is a big indicator of whether you are offering a quality user experience. No one wants to be waiting 10 seconds for a webpage to load. 1 in 4 visitors to a website will abandon a website if it takes more than 4 seconds to load. (Source: LoadStorm, Econsultancy). Even some of the most popular websites are not immune to expectations of speed, for example The BBC loses an additional 10% of users for every extra second it takes for its site to load. (Source: Website Builder Expert)
So, speed is a vital ranking factor and don’t forget mobile, mobile mobile!
Speed is an even larger ranking factor for mobile so always look to improve site speed on both desktop and mobile and make sure your website is mobile-friendly, so it looks as good on mobile as it does on desktop and that it functions just as well.
Our quick tip for speed is to invest in good hosting, as you really do get what you pay for when it comes to quality and speed. Our other top tips include reducing image file sizes and to look at what order your page loads it’s content. It is well known that Google uses Mobile First Indexing, and so it is imperative that your mobile site is up to scratch.
You can read some more tips about the impact of website speed here: How website speed impacts the performance of your business | Varn
At Varn we think it is so important to be open with our clients about what will actually make a difference when it comes to search marketing and being trusted here is key. This means we take enormous pride in not over complicating an issue, or bombarding a client with technical jargon. If you want to chat about SEO and any search marketing challenges do get in touch.
Article by: Tom Vaughton, Founder & Managing Director of Varn
Did you know 85% of people research the products they want to buy online before they make their decision?
When prospects land on a website of interest, yes they want information about the product on offer, but they are actually looking for a lot more than that at this early stage of the buying journey. They want to know what options are available, the price differentiation of those options, what the pros and cons of different products are, whether there are any related sustainability concerns and the general ethos of suppliers. In short, they want as much information as possible, so they feel well informed before they make their decision.
This is step one in the customer journey and yet it often gets overlooked.
Increase your influence
The most basic customer journey is the customer experience from finding out about a product, through to placing an order. Companies that pay this process the attention it deserves will create a Customer Journey Map to visually represent the journey their prospects take before they become customers, while they are customers, and possibly include after-sales service too. Breaking the process down in this way helps businesses to better understand each milestone in the journey and what impact they have on influencing the outcome at each stage. The more influence you can have during the research stages, the more likely prospects are to come back to you when they’re ready to buy.
Blog to build trust
A business blog is useful throughout the whole customer journey but really comes into its own in the early stages. The rest of a website will be front and centre for the second step in the process, when prospects have narrowed down their options and want to see what different competitors have to offer, but during this first step, more generic authoritative market information is a must have.
For example, if a homeowner is looking to buy a new conservatory, they will want to know about the pros and cons of conservatories vs extensions. They will want to know about the different styles of conservatory available, different types of materials used to manufacture conservatories and the pros and cons of glass vs solid conservatory roofing options. Someone looking to sign up to a new fitness regime on the other hand might first want to know about the latest popular trends in diet and exercise and which exercises are better for strength, flexibility or cardio.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t offer all of these products or services, by talking knowledgably about them you position yourself as an expert in the entire field. It is this expertise that warms a prospect to you and builds trust before they have even had any direct contact with you.
Make it easy
If you can make it easy for prospects to find the general market or product information they need, you will build trust and loyalty in your brand and visitors are more likely to return. Consistent business blogs are a great way of helping prospects find you in the first place because fresh content boosts search engine optimisation. You can read more about this here (https://blogwrite.co.uk/why-consistent-blogs-are-better/). Then, if your blog is full of helpful information, prospects can browse through it in their own time and gather everything they need to make an informed choice.
When you think about the customer journey in this way, who are they more likely to opt for? The company with the excellent informative blog that popped up at the top of their search and gave them all the information they need? Or the company that was hard to find in the first place and then only gave details of their own products with no additional market or product information? I know which one I’d choose!
So, when mapping out your online presence, don’t forget step one in your customer’s journey. Be helpful in the early stages and the trust and goodwill you build in the beginning, will come to fruition later, when they are ready to buy.
Our friends at TechSPARK are celebrating the CreaTech sector this month so we thought we’d join in and highlight five awesome businesses from the Bristol Creative Industries member community.
As outlined in this article, CreaTech is the term used to describe where creativity meets technology. The Creative Industries Council defines it as “bringing together creative skills and emerging technologies to create new ways of engaging audiences and to inspire business growth and investment”.
The CreaTech sector is strong in the UK as a recent report by Tech Nation showed. Despite a very tough year in 2020, CreaTech companies raised a record £981.8m in 2020. That puts the UK third in the world for CreaTech venture capital investment, behind only the US and China.
The sector is big news in our region too with the South West having the highest median investment between 2015 and 2020, ahead of Scotland and London.
With that in mind, we thought it was the perfect excuse to showcase five businesses from the Bristol Creative Industries member community doing amazing things. Connect with them by visiting their member profile. If you want to join the community, you can sign up here.
This company describes itself as “changing the face of cyber security education for young adults” through its CyberStart product. The platform that gamifies cyber security education has been used by over 200,000 students. Teaching cyber security to 13-18-year-olds is hard so this is a really innovative way to do it. In the game, participants take on cyber-criminals by solving puzzles and using learning techniques like code breaking and password cracking,
The company has a US version of the product and it was recently part of the National Cyber Scholarship competition with over 10,000 high school and college students taking part.
Congrats to the 70 CA HS students named National Cyber Scholars! Thank you @CyberStartUSA @NCScholarship for nurturing + empowering our next generation of #cybersecurity experts. See full list of our rising stars https://t.co/OCBYY1nwfo pic.twitter.com/HGd8RI119W
— Dept. of Technology (@CADeptTech) June 8, 2021
Visit Helical Levity’s BCI member profile
In the midst of Euro 2020 (come on England!), it seems appropriate to include this Bath-based business. Founded in 2017, StatsBomb provides football data and analytics to clubs, media and gambling companies across the world. The company has developed its own proprietary, industry-leading data collection and analytics software with a user-friendly high-vis front end.
The business started out as a team of three but now has over 150 employees based in its head office in Bath and in the US and Egypt.
Yerson Mosquera, Atlético Nacional 2020 & 2021
Wolves have become the latest club to dip into the South American market 🇨🇴
Scouting from a global database has never been more important. StatsBomb customers can shortlist players from 80+ competitions 🌎https://t.co/TY2rzzCOBN pic.twitter.com/XxJ480y2uP
— StatsBomb (@StatsBomb) June 17, 2021
Visit StatsBomb’s BCI member profile
Bristol-based Gravitywell describes itself as using “technology and creativity to guide businesses through digital transformation and help startups blossom and achieve their goals”.
The company has delivered some impressive projects including working with English Heritage and artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins to creatre an interactive illustrated web app map of English myths and legends.
In just six weeks, the team designed, built and launched the web app. They turned Clive’s analogue artwork into a digital production that brought the creatures and characters to life. The map picked up a number of awards, including best digital design at the 2919 SPARKies, TechSPARK’s annual awards celebrating the best tech in the west.
View Gravitywell’s BCI member profile
We are all craving the return of international travel and here’s a company that can help when we can finally go on our next adventures. Bristol-based TravelLocal is disrupting and bringing online the huge tailor-made holidays market and pioneering the “buy local” movement in travel.
The company’s cutting edge web software platform connects locally-owned travel companies in more than 60 countries worldwide with a global client base of travellers, to create and deliver tailor-made holidays.
TravelLocal was started in 2008 by founders Tom and Huw who felt something was missing from the travel industry. Big tour operators were dominating the market and the local experts that planned the trips were treated as a “trade secret”. They started TravelLocal to change that.
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Visit TravelLocal’s BCI member profile
This Bristol-based company believes “there’s a brilliant storyteller in everyone but sometimes you just need a little help unlocking your superpower”. Sparkol was “born out of the simple belief that everyone should be able to share their stories quickly, easily and affordably (without any special skills)”.
The company’s flagship software, VideoScribe, has been used by over two million users worldwide. It allows users to quickly create professional-looking animations.
Another service is Scribley which gets you creating engaging video experiences in minutes using a browser on desktop or tablet.
If you don’t want to do it yourself, Sparkol Studio can help by taking your wildest ideas and transforming them into ‘share-worthy’ video content, and Sparkol Academy provides training on video skills and animation.
Visit Sparkol’s BCI member profile
We love the creativity of Bristol Creative Industries members and there are hundreds more we could have shared. Meet them all in the member directory. If you want to be featured, join as a member.
The Creative Industries Council CreaTech Ones to Watch competition is celebrating inspiring companies and consortiums from across the UK. We’d love to see some BCI members featured. You can enter here until 28 June.
Since my earliest years, I’ve been a fan of athletics. Long-distance running in particular. I’ve watched it on TV. Chatted about it with friends. Followed its greatest exponents with fascination and even become something of an (armchair) expert on the subject.
But until a year or two ago, I’d never taken the plunge and given it a go myself. It felt like something reserved for others. Something that you needed to prepare for meticulously, before ever getting out there and hitting the pavements for yourself. It just seemed altogether too difficult to try.
Then something changed. I was persuaded by a friend to join them on the journey from ‘couch to 5K’. And, at the risk of being that annoying running evangelist, I’ve never looked back.
For many in the marketing world, account-based marketing holds the same appeal – and presents equally erroneous perceived obstacles. It looks great. It seems to work brilliantly for others. But it can also appear prohibitively complicated and quite possibly hideously expensive.
Happily, if you get account-based marketing right, those negative perceptions are some way wide of the mark. And in this article, I’ll explain why it’s an approach you can’t afford to ignore.
There are websites, books, research papers, even degree courses devoted to an explanation of account-based marketing. But for our purposes today, I’m going to keep things straightforward. At Proctor + Stevenson, we view ABM as marketing that identifies high-value companies within defined sectors, and focuses on generating quality sales leads through targeted strategy and pinpoint messaging.
It’s an approach we’ve employed to great effect over the past few years, helping clients including Panasonic outperform campaign goals by as much as 100%. And we’re not alone: Forrester research reports that 62% of marketers have reported a positive impact on their marketing performance since adopting ABM.
It comes with strong credentials then. But if that isn’t enough to help you persuade your colleagues that account-based marketing is the way forward, here are those five key reasons that should really turn the argument in your favour…
The pandemic has taught us that certain sales and marketing approaches are affected by external conditions and factors beyond our control. Exhibitions and events being an obvious one. Account-based marketing remains impervious to those irresistible forces, replacing sales meetings and product demonstrations with digital outreach and online communication. It also has the flexibility to incorporate more ‘traditional’ tactics (personalised direct mail, for example) when the time and targeting is right, making it the marketing strategy for all seasons.
The beauty of ABM lies in its focus. Unlike other broad-brush strategies that make marketing a numbers game, account-based marketing is lean and keen, ensuring that your financial resources are allocated only where they’re going to have maximum, direct impact. Even in those longer B2B buying cycles, there’s no wastage. Communications and marketing collateral are sent to those prospects you’ve identified as interested, via the channels they use, carrying messages you know will resonate with them.
Most ABM strategies are built with digital communication at their core. So you can account for every penny or euro you spend, and attribute every click, reply, meeting booking, expression of interest or sales opportunity you elicit directly back to the activity you’ve instigated. And there’s little that will make your board-level colleagues happier than that.
Ah, the old sales vs marketing conundrum. Should be best of friends, very rarely are. In this respect, you can think of account-based marketing as the United Nations. Employed properly, an ABM strategy achieves that holy grail – a harmonious collaboration in which marketing and sales work in tandem, generating interest, qualifying leads and nurturing prospects until they’re ready to hit ‘buy’ (and beyond, if your ABM strategy is far-sighted enough).
As I mentioned a little earlier, our clients have enjoyed great success with account-based marketing over the past year or two. Working with them, we’ve doubled projected lead targets, improved ROI, achieved better conversion rates, even generated six-figure sales pipeline. And all within the parameters of tight marketing budgets.
The final advantage of ABM that I’ll mention here is that it isn’t an all-or-nothing strategy. It looks different for every business. And we can help you take those first steps towards making it work for yours. So if you’d like to know more, don’t sit on the side lines any longer. Lace up your shoes, get in touch and let’s see where account-based marketing can take you.
On June 16th, Adapt is hosting a webinar in conversation with Head of Ad Tech at IAB UK, Tina Lakhani, about how businesses can start preparing for life after third-party cookies. Register here…
Third-party cookies are soon to be a thing of the past.
This – we hope – shouldn’t be brand new information, as Google announced in February 2020 they were going to begin phasing out third-party cookies on Chrome next year.
What’s caused a stir more recently is Google’s further announcement that they are not going to create “alternative identifiers” to track users and will not use these in their products.
And that was not the way many marketers wanted the third-party cookie to crumble.
For marketers, these trackers were our bread and butter – they allowed us to not only track our website users, but we used them to improve user experience and, most importantly, to ‘collect data that helped us target ads to the right audiences’.
It’s obvious that we need to go, at least partly, back to the drawing board and properly prepare for life after third-party cookies. But a lot of us don’t know where to start, despite the fact many of the points below are, arguably, best practice already.
To help you better prepare for life after third-party cookies, we’ve put together a list of the 11 ways we think you should be readying your business for the incoming data gap.
This again is one which we hope you have begun exploring. If you haven’t then now is the time to start.
Google’s customer match is a very nifty tool. You can use information that your customers have shared with you to create targeted ads across search, the shopping tab, Gmail and YouTube. It will also help target new customers who have similar interests to your existing users.
Another great tool to have in your wheelhouse is Facebook’s custom audiences. With this, you can opt for your chosen ad to target your desired audience among Facebook users. It also allows you to utilize Facebook’s customer lists and website traffic to develop a tailored audience of users who have engaged with your brand.
Now is the perfect time to get creative and come up with new ways that will encourage users to share data with you. Here are three ways you could grow your database:
This shouldn’t be a new concept for you since GDPR came into effect.
Be sure to check the data you already have in order to gain a clear insight into what data you’ve got, and then update your privacy policy to shed light on how you are using this data.
Permission management tools should be on your radar, and you can add these to your website so users can take control of their consent and data.
As we are now losing valuable data, we need to start thinking beyond the usage of cookies. We can do this by optimizing our usage of the data we still have.
Now is the perfect time to experiment with various management strategies to see which ones are most effective. Once you have found which strategies work best you should make these bulletproof for the future.
Many industry-leading tech companies are developing new ways to harness first-party data, so it’s worth taking an active role in as many tests as possible.
Google is encouraging businesses to lean into using privacy-focused solutions, and one they are championing in particular is the use of ‘value-based bidding’, as well as a new first-party cookie solution to assist with conversion tracking.
Contextual targeting is often overlooked, but it’s a great strategy to use as it doesn’t use third-party cookies.
While it does involve dedicating a great deal of time to figuring out where best to place your ads on certain platforms, it is certainly worth the effort.
Your targeted audience is more likely to respond to these ads as they won’t feel as though their privacy has been breached. Once you have gained the trust of your customers, you will be able to build strong lasting relationships.
These relationships can help you further as you will soon be able to spot patterns and user behavior within specific groups, which will provide you with vital data you can track.
MartechSeries defines people-based marketing as “a means to create a customer-centric, cohesive marketing system that revolves around customers and their real-time behavioral data”.
When you combine this data with your first-party data you will be able to target your desired audience in real-time across a variety of channels. People-based marketing is a great solution as it does not rely on third-party cookies and it also allows you to engage with users directly at a time that suits them.
According to BounceX, a successful people-based marketing strategy has three key elements:
GA4 will be an excellent tool to use as it is being developed with stronger cloud-based, machine-learning modeling and will pair nicely with server-side tracking.
While GA4 won’t be a replacement for the current iteration of GA, having both these analytics tools at your disposal will have a considerable impact on your data tracking.
Or you can use other systems like Google Tag Manager that focus on site-wide first-party tagging. These are designed to drastically increase the volume of the conversion data you already have.
To put it simply, you really should be using these, as these ad platform tools have been created to help optimize these conversions.
With this amount of data, you will be able to distinguish in more detail what campaigns are proving effective, and which need to be restructured.
It’s not just about quantity when it comes to collecting data, it’s also about quality. So rather than worrying about what data you don’t have, work with the data that you have now.
Focus your energy on hiring the right people who will be able to go through your data with a fine-tooth comb and optimize your business models.
We also recommend giving your contact lists a refresh on a regular basis to ensure you don’t have irrelevant contacts. You could make this automatic by creating a system that deletes contacts who haven’t reacted to your messages for a pre-determined period of time.
Allowing your users to have the power to opt in or out of their subscriptions is another great way to maintain the quality of your database. Those that leave are contacts you do not need, and this opt-in system shows users you comply with the data protection legislation.
If you want to get ahead in a cookie-less world, you need to understand what identifiers your business is using, and with this information you can begin to profile your visits.
Create ‘collection points’ throughout your website and then you can use this collected data to understand your audience in a more detailed light.
CookiePro, for instance, is talking about two types of User IDs that could be used in the future. And while we’re not confident enough to make the same claim ourselves, they do offer an interesting glimpse at the types of solutions that are incoming.
The first is Probabilistic ID, which is a type of ID used to reap the rewards of anonymous data points. You can use this type of data to find behavioral parallels between these anonymous users and your known users.
Deterministic ID is basically a form of identifiable data. Examples of this type of ID are log-in data, offline data, or information the user has agreed to share with you.
The departure of third-party cookies is something that we can’t ignore – it’s going to drastically change the digital marketing landscape as we know it.
But we still have time to re-think and re-model our marketing strategies, and the earlier we start to implement these changes, the more prepared we will be when third-party cookies have gone stale.
Establishing and maintaining a business blog is unfortunately not as easy as sitting down and writing the first things that pop into your head. As in daily face to face conversations we can all be guilty of going off on a tangent now and then, and the same can be true of our blog posts. A little bit off centre this way and that can be interesting and add depth, but the most successful blogs offer a service and don’t deviate from that purpose. Here is how to keep your company’s blog on track.
Your blog, website and business will remain the ‘go to’ source of information, as long as you keep your end of the bargain and continue to publish useful content consistently.
As of March 2021, P+S are now an official Amazon Web Services (AWS) Select Consulting Partner. Hurray! Exciting news for us – but why should anyone else care?
Don’t worry. This isn’t your typical self-congratulatory post.
What this means is we can help clients to grow and scale their businesses on AWS. So you could get a cost saving, industry-leading and super secure application.
To achieve our AWS Select Tier status, we had to demonstrate a whole lot of team knowledge and prove the strength of our experience too. So, over the past 4 months, we’ve delivered High Availability architecture for clients like Osborne Clarke and the UK Hydrographic Office.
So, we’ve written this blog to tell you just why you should take note about what AWS has to offer, and answer a few of the questions you might have.
Because they’re the industry’s leading cloud provider.
AWS offers a huge list of services and a robust global infrastructure that we knew could serve our clients around the world. If it’s good enough for 90% of the world’s Fortune 100 companies and the majority of Fortune 500 companies, it’s good enough for us.
And now our partnership status is testament to our experience and knowledge when it comes to designing and implementing cloud architecture.
As an application implementation, development and infrastructure partner, we can achieve a very close link between your applications’ functionality and its environment, ensuring you always get the very best performance.
We can save you time and money.
It’s likely you already know on-premise infrastructure can be hugely expensive. Or you might be using cloud computing, but finding it’s still costing you a fortune. With the right cloud architecture in place, not only can you gain a huge price advantage, you could also save countless hours of time, too.
Commissioning just one new server can take several days and thousands of pounds of hardware investment. But in the cloud, the same process takes just a few seconds. Plus, you can spin servers up and remove them again easily, and without having to worry about hardware.
Our use cases are normally centred around creating web architecture, where this flexibility is useful for creating cost effective solutions. A traditional web architecture might consist of several web servers behind a load balancer, where traffic is distributed across the instances according to some rules.
The problem with this traditional set up is that during lulls in user activity, e.g., overnight or over the weekend, you end up with more servers than you need – you’re just haemorrhaging money.
Conversely, during traffic spikes, you might not have enough capacity to meet demand, putting your application’s performance at risk.
Auto-scaling prevents this by automatically adding more servers to the group if demand requires it. When the demand drops, these servers are removed.
Because in the words of Werner Vogels, “Everything fails, all the time”.
All technological solutions – no matter how perfect we might like them to be – will have points of failure and downtime. In fact, even cloud solutions within AWS are subject to the same risks.
By creating an infrastructure that anticipates this failure, we can overcome the risks and mitigate the impact before a failure ever happens.
For example, the AWS network consists of several geographical regions based around the world. These regions are further divided into Availability Zones. An Availability Zone is made up of separate physical data centres that are connected within a region.
You can then split your services across Availability Zones, so should one develop a problem, you’ll hardly notice – your application will still be up and running.
At P+S we follow the AWS principals for High Availability across all of our clients’ architecture to ensure there are no single points of failure, and recovery is automatic wherever possible.
Yes. In fact, at AWS, they have a saying: Security is Priority Zero.
This is for good reason, given the critical nature of data security and harsh penalties for businesses who breach regulations.
There are multiple features in AWS’ tools and services ensuring every design meets stringent compliance requirements, with our own architecture including many of these features as standard.
For example, we deploy AWS CloudFront as a CDN as standard in front of all our sites, together with AWS Web Application Firewall and AWS Shield to protect your site against web vulnerabilities and attack vectors, including the OWASP Top 10 – globally recognised by developers as the top 10 risks to application security – and Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks (DDoS), which you may have seen recently taking a number of the Belgium government’s websites offline. It also ensures you’re compliant with Data Protection standards such as ISO 27001.
AWS also provides the ability to create entire virtual networks and subnets within the cloud, with complete control over data and user access and flow. This gives you the ability to lock down access to subnets, instances, and services to only authorised sources. For example, you can block physical access to web application servers, ensuring access can only be gained from the load balancer or approved IPs.
No. One of our favourite methodologies in cloud infrastructure is ‘server-less architecture’.
Server-less architecture means the servers or machine resources used to run a particular task are handled by the cloud provider. So you don’t have to worry about provisioning a server or maintaining it. This saves a lot of time and money; we can simply spin up a database or run code.
This methodology is extremely useful when working on prototypes, for example, allowing us to quicker develop and verify our ideas. It’s also useful for running Continuous Integration workloads to speed up deployments (useful for Autoscaling groups) and helping you manage repetitive tasks or queues.
For example, we successfully offloaded some database queue processing from the application into AWS Lambda. This meant we could configure a smaller database instance than would otherwise have been necessary.
Our summary
At P+S, we believe every business should be able to offer an excellent digital service to their customers. That means creating flexible digital architecture that grows as you – and your customers – need it to. It’s faster, more adaptable, and because it’s flexible, you won’t waste money on servers you don’t need.
Your application shouldn’t go offline unexpectedly. And we don’t believe you should have to pay more for a secure website, so we’ll ensure both your data and your customers’ info is protected at all times.
And our newly earned AWS Select Consulting Partner badge proves that commitment.
Want to find out more? Talk to [email protected] for a no-obligation chat.