Hi Team,

Hope everyone is well!

As you may have heard by now, Google Chrome is deprecating ALL third-party cookies in 2024 🍪🍪

1% of all Google Chrome Users (~30 million people) will not be tracked via third-party cookies from January 4th, 2024 and 100% of Chrome users will not be tracked by Q3, 2024.

As Google Chrome has >60% market share (and with Safari & Firefox already deprecating cookies), the doom of third-party cookies is impending.

Now, I’m predicting that most of you are reading this and thinking “what is this bloke going on about” …

If you stick with me for another 500 words, I am going to explain the following:

• What is a third-party cookie 🍪?

• As a CX professional, why should you care about this change?

• How will the changes impact your organisations approach to CX?

Why CX Will Become 2.8X More Important In 270 Days Time 👀

An article published by Epsilon found that advertisers will pay a 2.8x premium for behaviorally targeted ads.

The problem?

With the deprecation of third-party cookies in October 2024, it is going to be significantly harder for marketing teams to deploy behaviorally targeted ads using traditional methods.

So, What Is A Third-Party Cookie? 🍪

Third-party cookies are cookies created by domains other than the one you are visiting directly, hence the name “third-party”.

They are used for cross-site tracking, retargeting and ad-serving. Third-party cookies are placed not by the website, but by third-parties, e.g. advertisers.

These cookies are used to identify a person who is using a particular website. These cookies then carry this information between websites so that you can see how the user is moving through the internet.

By doing this, platforms like Google Display Ads and Facebook can start to understand a user’s online history and then use this data to target advertising messages.

This is why it can sometimes feel like somebody is creepily watching over your shoulder as you browse the internet.  These third party cookies track multi-site behaviours and allows the advertising platforms to connect your activity as you browse between sites. 

The resulting experience for users can be highly targeted advertising messages. 

As a CX Professional, Why Should I Care About This Change? 🤷‍♂️

Without the granular tracking facilitated by third-party cookies, marketers are going to face challenges in delivering hyper-targeted ads.

This is likely going to have an impact on ad relevance, effectiveness and ultimately Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).

Put simply, marketing teams are going to have to spend more to acquire new customers.

This is going to create an interesting inflection point for organisations, which is likely going to create a stronger focus on 2 things:

1. FIRST-PARTY DATA - As marketers will no longer have access to a wealth of third-party behavioural information, there will be an increasing demand for them to leverage the behaviours of customers (and prospects) who have interacted with their own organisation.
   
   Data sources such as Digital Experience Analytics, Omnichannel Signals, Text Analytics Topics & Conversational Data (e.g. Call & Chat Transcripts) should all be used to inform future marketing campaigns.

2. AN INCREASED FOCUS ON RETENTION - Let’s hypothesise for a second. If the cost to acquire a customer increased from £15 to £20 overnight, would you continue pursuing the same acquisition strategy? Most likely not. As such, Executives may begin to think of alternative ways to deploy their capital for a higher ROI.
   
   One way that they could do this is by shifting some marketing budget to customer retention and/or upsell activities. Most organisations have significantly more data about their existing customers which puts them in the driving seat when trying to retain their business, or upsell them into new services. Historically, there has been no real incentive to focus on customer retention as much as customer acquisition, however this change to cookies might just be the sticking point!

How Will These Changes Impact Your Organisations Approach To CX?

People & Information

As marketers will no longer be able to use third party data to track their customers behaviours, there will be a newfound obsession with tracking every movement that customers make on their own channels:

• Website Behaviours

• App Behaviours

• Call Centre Interactions

  • Calls

  • Chats

  • Emails

  • SMS / WhatsApp

• Physical Locations

• Social Media

Now when you look at the above channels, it becomes quite evident that marketing teams are going to have a heavy reliance on CX data sources & the associated behavioural insights.

The POWER OF INSIGHT / INFORMATION now sits within CX teams. As such, there is going to be a greater need for Marketing & CX teams to collaborate closely, ensuring customer signals are continuously used to deliver personalised, omni-channel marketing campaigns.

Technology

As first-party interactions can be both online & offline, it is going to be critical to use UNIQUE IDENTIFIERS to connect the dots of customer behaviour across multiple channels.

In order to do this, organisations are going to have to figure out ways to build a SINGLE CUSTOMER VIEW. This term is not new and it’s very apparent that most organisations have built (or are in the process of building) customer data lakes.

In saying this, the BEST ORGANISATIONS will take things a step further, and will ensure that the single customer view doesn’t stay stagnant. This view must be dynamically updated in real-time, and used by marketing & retention teams to consistently communicate personalised messages to the customer:

• Upsell opportunities

• Onboarding guidance

• Service outages / delays

• Retention offers

To sum things up, I’m going to leave you all with some homework 📖 …

Go and have a chat to your marketing team and understand what first-party data they’re currently collecting for marketing activities. I bet that there’s a data source you’re responsible for that they’re currently unaware of, or not using to it’s full effect!

VISUAL OF THE WEEK 🌁

A little story about Domino’s which gained some traction on LinkedIn …

Follow me on LinkedIn 👇