All posts by Lead Reign

Cookies used to be a highly effective digital marketing tool. Now that they are gone, what impact has that made on digital advertisers? Chrome and Chromium-based browsers stopped supporting third-party cookies in 2022, which effected everyone in the advertising industry. Traditional digital advertising and monetization methods have become less effective or even stopped working altogether as a result.

In this article, we explain why third-party cookies were canceled, how this will affect publishers and advertisers, and what you need to do now so that these changes won’t affect your ad revenue.

Why did third-party cookies go away?

Third-party cookies are online user identifiers that are set by a third-party platform or technology provider on the website the user is visiting. Cookies are stored on the user’s device. Brands have long used third-party cookies to track website visitors, improve user experience, and collect data to target ads to the right audience. The main advantage of third-party cookies for advertisers was that they enabled the tracking of what users were browsing throughout the entire web within a specific browser, not just on the site on which these cookies had been installed.

The third-party cookies cancellation is due to the users’ growing distrust of third-party cookies. The latter doesn’t allow the users to control where and how their personally identifiable information or PII is used.

“Users are demanding greater privacy—including transparency, choice, and control over how their data is used — and it’s clear the web ecosystem needs to evolve to meet these increasing demands,” Google announced in a blog post on March 3, 2021.

That’s also the goal of the data protection regulations created over the past 5 years (for example, the GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in California). One of their main purposes is to inform users about what data is being used and allow them to choose who to entrust their data to.

Although Chrome is not the first browser to disable third-party cookies, it has the highest market share at 64% of all users. Safari (ranked second) and Firefox (ranked third) stopped tracking users via third-party cookies over a year ago.

It’s worth remembering that not all types of cookies have been disabled. First-party cookies, which are created by the publisher or advertiser and are not transferred to third parties, will stay in place. Their purpose is to facilitate interaction with the user: remember passwords, search preferences, purchase history, recommendations, items saved in the cart, etc.

Private messaging is having a huge impact on digital marketing. Recent surveys of prospects show customers prefer that form of communication with the brands they like. 60% of EU customers and 51% of US customers prefer messaging over email or phone calls as they believe it is faster and more convenient.

This is according to a study by Spectrm, a marketing platform businesses use to automate one-to-one conversations with consumers on messaging channels.

The State of Social Conversational Commerce report surveyed 1,726 consumers: 780 from the EU and 946 from the U.S. with the purpose of better understanding their experiences messaging with brands, if messaging led to them purchasing a product, their thoughts on privacy and data collection, and more.

Max Koziolek, CEO of Spectrm, said, “We found private messaging has a profound impact on brand affinity and sales, more than most marketers may be aware. While conversational commerce has been growing in popularity for a few years, many brands limit their conversations only to chatbots on their websites. Our report’s findings shed light on why this is the wrong way to think about conversational commerce. Instead, consumers want to engage with your brand in the same way they’re already communicating with their friends: through private messaging on Messenger, Instagram DMs or WhatsApp.”

Other key Findings include:

• 81% of EU respondents and 78% of US respondents said they would be comfortable giving preferences to a brand in a private and safe way, to receive a more personalised experience.
• 67% of EU respondents and 52% of US respondents have messaged with a company on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp.
• 53% of EU respondents and 43% of US respondents have clicked on a Click to Messenger ad.

If your digital marketing strategy does not include private messaging, then you are making a mistake. Contact us today for a private messaging campaign that works.