The Cookie-less Future
As Google does away with third-party cookies, learn what marketing teams need to prepare for and rethink when it comes to their data strategies.
Hi, Courtney, thank you so much for joining us today.
Hey, Sarah, thanks so much to you and the Qualified team for having me.
Okay, so today we're talking about the cookie-less future.
But to start, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and about thick
cents and
how is thick cents just thinking about cookies and a cookie-less future?
Yeah, for sure.
So first of all, for those of you that don't know what 6 cents does or who we
are, we help
our customers uncover and leverage data to achieve revenue targets.
And I've been with 6 cents for a little bit over 5 and a half years.
I started on board to lead our field and partner marketing teams and then start
our community
programs as well.
And just over the course of working with various customers and partners and
being a user myself,
I wanted to transition to product marketing to help continue solidify our
position in the
market as leaders.
And so now I'm serving 6 cents in a product marketing capacity focused
specifically on
our advertising capabilities.
Perfect, which is why I'm so excited to have you here.
Because I think as we talk about a cookie-less future, I think advertising is
probably the
most, obviously the most impact I think where everyone is the most concerned.
So I would love to chat really quick.
I think before we even get into like the strategies or what people can be
thinking about from
cookies in general for marketers, I'd love to just have a rundown from you on
what is
cookies mean?
Like if there's different types of cookies, how should we be thinking about
them?
How can we define them?
And then more importantly, how can we use them in marketing?
What's changing at the end of this year?
Yeah, definitely.
So I think we tend to complex by cookies a little bit and make them super
technical.
But essentially, cookies are pieces of information saved by our web browsers to
track our online
behavior.
And the types of data cookies are storing are things like user names, passwords
, our search
preferences, our interests.
So it's things like that.
And there are several different types of cookies.
You've got your session cookies, your first party cookies, your third party
cookies.
But for the purposes of our conversation today, I want to keep it focused on
third party cookies,
which the industry commonly refers to as three PC.
And as marketers, there's essentially two ways that we use third party cookies.
The first is to target our audience.
And the second is to measure the effectiveness of those targeting programs.
So really straightforward.
But in the last sort of several years as we've come up with different privacy
laws and data
protection regulations, consumers and privacy advocates have said, you know
what?
Like we don't want to feel like we're being followed around by ads.
If I am on Nike's website looking at shoes and then I switch over to ESPN to
check basketball
scores for the March Madness tournament, I don't want to see an ad from Nike
trying
to get me to buy their shoes.
We almost feel like this is creepy, if you will.
And so some of the major web browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, they
've said,
okay, you know what?
As users, we respect your privacy.
And so we're just going to do away with third party cookies.
And Google as the last major player sort of like standing if you will has
gotten a lot
of pressure as you might imagine to follow suit.
And so they've said 2024 is the year.
We are going to start slowly deprecating third party cookies and by the end of
the year,
they're going to be gone.
That's so interesting.
I loved your example of looking at shoes and then going on the internet.
Because the first thing I think of is five, maybe 10 years ago, that kind of
retargeting
I thought was so cool.
And especially being a marketing where I'm like, oh, I forgot about this.
And now I see this ad and it was just so, I mean, as impactful it worked, like
it helped.
That's why it became such a retargeting became such a like massive advertising
strategy.
But I think it's so interesting is over time as especially people listening
into this session,
a lot of us are marketers.
We're so in tune to what's happening that I think we've all yeah, we've all
gotten almost
too used to it and we are turned off by it.
Like it is getting creepy.
We're like, man, I like, or I, it's just gotten to be too much.
And as marketers as tends have evolved and we've all learned this strategy, I
think it's
just less impactful.
And what I'm so excited to chat about today is yes, this cookieless future is
happening,
but I feel like this is a way it's been going for a while.
Like advertisers and marketers have been talking about their strategies that
have been leading
to, you know, less reliance on cookies and more like first party.
So I'm excited to keep chatting about that because I think it's taking us in a
direction
that we've been headed for in a while anyways.
So with that being said, okay, now we understand all the buzzwords.
We know first party cookies, third party cookies.
I how many times I say cookies before I get too hungry.
You are a marketer on this call and you're like, you know what, I knew about
this.
I knew this was coming, but now it's time for me to actually put a strategy in
place.
What is the first thing that you would do to start thinking about this and
making an
impact to your organization?
Yeah, I love your reference, you know, in terms of thinking about we've been
pairing
for this for a while.
Now I started with six cents in 2018 and this was a topic all the way back then
So it's been a long time coming.
And I think as marketers, when we think about third party cookies, we just have
to address
the fact that some of our current strategies and tactics are inevitably going
to break.
And so I'll just give a couple of examples.
I think we can start with visitor retargeting.
That's a common strategy that's pretty easy to wrap your mind around.
But when you have an individual that comes to your website, but they don't take
some
sort of conversion act, like downloading a form, or sorry, excuse me,
downloading any
book or filling out a form, and then they leave your website, we may set up
programs
to try to get them back to the website.
And this just isn't possible without third party cookies.
Another good one that's really common in B2C is affiliate marketing.
So this is when you pay another person to advertise your product.
Let's just take an example with me and you here, Sarah.
I'm trying really hard to get back into running shape.
I have no idea if you are, but let's just say you yourself are an avid runner
and you're
not.
Okay.
But you're still going to give me the advice and you wrote a blog on the top 10
best long
distance running shoes for women.
I look at your recommendations.
I love Nike.
I click on Nike and I go and I purchase the shoe.
D might give you a percentage of that purchase for sharing your link and
helping them share
the product.
But the problem here is most common.
What happens is I click on the link.
I look at the Nike shoe.
I can't decide.
I go check out Brooks or Mizuno or Adidas.
And then 10 days later, I go back to actually make the purchase of the Nike
shoe.
It's really hard to track what's happening once you leave the website visit.
And so I think this is a great example of where the measurement side is going
to come
into play.
Like, if I go back 10 days later and make that purchase as an affiliate market
er, Sarah,
you're not going to get the credit for that.
Another example, let's just take third party data, right?
So a lot of people to do targeting and even our own customers will layer this
on top of
six cents account data.
You'll work with a vendor like Oracle.
You'll purchase a list that I want all users that work for marketing at
technology companies
with 5,000 employees or more.
And the companies do 3 billion annually in revenue.
Strategies like this don't work without third party cookies.
And so I think it's just really important that first and foremost, as marketers
, we're
taking stock of like, what are the things we're doing today that are working
really
well that mainly leverage third party cookies?
Then we can start to think about, okay, how do I shift those strategies?
Yeah, that's such a good point of going through all of those advertising
strategies and trying
to understand which one of these are leveraging third party cookies.
I think your example that you started with retargeting will be such an
important one
for probably most people on this call that are in B2B marketing.
I think that's a pretty common tactic.
What I find so interesting about this is, well, I love retargeting ads.
I've used them for a very long time.
My background was in digital marketing before I got into demand gen is I'm
curious to see
if the quality of people that are converting goes up with this decrease in
third party
cookies because if I think about like, okay, I'm retargeting someone they've
been to my
website, they've done research and then I follow them around the internet,
either they have
it converted.
Yes, they might come back.
They might fill out a form.
But is that ad that's driving them there?
Are they still a really high value, like high intent or high value?
Maybe not.
Or someone who has come to your website, browsed around, left, and then a
couple of days later
comes back organically to me, that organic revisit is probably a better signal
that they
have a higher likelihood to buy than that retargeting.
So anyways, it's just such an interesting that we might lose retargeting, but I
'm curious
to see if those visitors that are like multi session visitors that come back
over and over
again do convert at a higher rate.
So I will be curious to see how that goes.
And then it is also interesting to think about, yes, the affiliate marketing,
for me,
the biggest thing that concerns me about third party cookies going away is
attribution.
And I think that's something as someone in demand gen, we're always trying to
think of
the best way to like tie every single dollar spent to a dollar of revenue.
But for a long time, we've been talking about, is it worth it?
Like is having all that attribution worth it?
Or if your company is, you know, if you're driving pipeline, it's converting at
a really
like good conversion percentage.
That's what you want.
So being able to see so granular about the attribution.
So there's, it's so funny that there's been like these ongoing conversations
sort of happening
in the demand gen market about attribution anyways.
And I think this third party cookie going away will actually help some teams
make the
push to get to an attribution space that isn't so tied to a one to one spend to
pipeline ratio.
And I'm excited for that.
So anyways, that is my ramble.
So we talked about auditing first going through your strategies, but Courtney,
what's next
after you've audited?
What would you do next?
Yeah, no, and Sarah, I will just add to that.
I love the topic of attribution because it's so hard to do.
It's always been hard to do.
And if you're taking an account based approach, especially with advertising the
traditional
metrics, they don't matter.
They don't like who cares if I go to qualified's website and my sister goes to
qualified's
website and George goes to qualified's website.
Now if, you know, I go and my boss Nate goes and Latine comes to your website,
well, now
that that really matters because we're all at the same account.
And so I definitely think it will hopefully because measurement is going to be
so impacted
on my third party cookies, I think hopefully it forces marketers to start
really adopting
some of those account based metrics and looking at advertising as more of like
an influence
type of metric.
Yeah.
I think you can see a world where if people have been making that case to their
boss for
a long time and then now the sudden you're like, oh, well, I can't report on
that.
Anyways, because third party cookies are gone.
So hopefully we'll help drive them a direction of a way I think the market's
been going for
a long time anyways.
Yeah, totally.
Okay.
So you asked me what's next.
I think once you've taken stock of all right, what are we doing that's using
third party
cookies.
Now it's time to think about, okay, we can't do that anymore.
So where can we move that money?
And I think one really great option is to consider wall wall gardens or clothes
networks.
So those are channels where users are primary logged in.
So it's really good to think about now it's time to try Facebook and Instagram.
I think in our space LinkedIn is already a really, you know, common channel for
BW marketers,
but definitely LinkedIn and definitely Google because Google properties are all
going to
be protected as well.
That is, I love that rethinking the strategy.
So if you are looking at your, you audited and you're like, Oh, shoot, I'm
spending 40%
of my advertising budget on retargeting.
I don't want to lose that 40%.
I think a lot of times with marketing budgets, you can lose that money.
So it's like, okay, now after that audit, let's figure out a better way to
spend that money.
And you can still do it in advertising to your point.
You can do it on things like LinkedIn or Facebook or places where those people
are logged in
and you can identify them.
And again, this feels like something we've been doing for a long time anyways,
but figure
not where to reinvest that money in places that aren't reliant on third party
cookies.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
So I know we are getting close to our 20 minutes here.
So I would love to ask the final question here.
Market teams, how can you get the most out of our marketing calories in a
cookie list
future after we've audited and reevaluate in our strategies?
Yeah, I think so.
And we've already sort of said this a little bit, but my advice is just to
approach it
the same way you've always approached any of your marketing strategies, measure
what works
and put more money into those strategies and turn the things off that aren't
working.
I think it's important to keep in mind though that like some of the strategies
and tactics
that we've been doing that may have previously worked, they won't work anymore,
right?
So some of our things are going to break, but as long as you're testing what
works and
you can measure that against your KPIs, then you can move your money around
like we've just
said to where you know it's working as needed.
I definitely think it's going to be a little bit of a turbulent year for sure.
It's trial and error, but I think we just have to stay agile.
I totally agree.
If you're listening to this, I would say start now.
If you're relying pretty heavily on ad spend, start doing research and figuring
out how much
of that ad spend is reliant on a third party cookie.
I would start that immediately after this call, start to figure that out.
And then if you have a high percentage of your budget that is relying on third
party cookies,
two things that we've talked about is one, start thinking about where else
would you
respean that money and start thinking of a strategy for and how you're going to
go to
your executive team and defend why you would reallocate that budget versus
losing that
budget.
I think in a time where resources are scarce, it can be easy to just say, oh,
we'll just
take that budget back and just put it somewhere else in the company.
If you know that it's going to be impactful to keep advertising, start working
on a strategy
now to defend that budget.
And then secondly, as I would start thinking about your attribution, if you're
currently
doing a very reliant, like last touch, last click to pipeline, and that is
coming from
a lot of ad spend that's reliant on third party cookies, start brainstorming
now the
new way that you want to measure this to courties point is that an ABX is
talking about account
engagement.
Is it looking at account movement, but you are going to have to transition away
from
that strategy.
And it's better to start thinking of it now asking your peers now versus
waiting until
November and panicking when you realize all of your attribution is about to
break and
you might lose your budget.
So yeah, being said, Courtney, thank you so much for joining us today for this
session.
For everyone else that's listening, we do have a checklist to help you bring
back to
your own organization and look at some of the things that we talked about today
and work
your way through that list to make sure you are on track for the end of this
year that
end of 2024 when Google third party cookies are going away.
So go ahead and download that link and that's going to give you your checklist
to fall along.
Your ways, Courtney, thank you so much for joining us today.
This was super helpful.
Yeah, it's been a pleasure.
Thanks so much, Sarah.