Without third-party cookies may be a good thing for marketers.
As a media buyer working in a tech company, I might lose my job when I first heard Google plans to ban third-party cookies. How can I track user behavior and optimize our ads? I use Google Analytics every day…
However, after researching and discussing with our teams, the truth is not as bad as I thought, and the game won’t change completely in a short time.
Most importantly, it let me realize that I over-rely on “paid media” for marketing strategy. Today, I will talk about how we can do to face this challenge in advertising industry and my feeling as a user and marketer.
Back to Product & Target Audience
In the past few months, I have been working on the marketing strategy for a web meeting tool called MixerChat.
It’s always hard to make a new product outstanding in the market, and what we did was run ads that targeted users visiting our competitor’s websites like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Team. (We didn’t have enough traffic on our product website, so we tried to get them from competitors) Therefore, we need third-party cookie data to learn about web visitors’ overall online behaviors.
However, bringing people who are looking for web meeting tools to our product page doesn’t mean that people will decide to choose us.
What’s your product value?
Does the product feature solve our audience’s problem?
That’s the point why the conversion rate couldn’t grow up. People use Google Meet because it’s common, convenient, and easy for everyone, but Mixerchat emphasizes its breakout room feature, which lets users easily mingle with different teams.
For example, startups often need to brainstorm in cross-function teams, so we finally had a pitch at the startup conference. It worked! We got lots of users who eventually switched to our product rather than Google Meet or Zoom.
Long story short, I think paid media and third-party cookies make me feel like we can easily target users specifically but forget there are more than the “number of clicks.”
So, we still need third-party cookies or not?
As a marketer, of course yes!
It’s always helpful to have a tool to target specific users. Without it, all companies must spend more budget and time pushing ads to the right users.
But if Google finally bans it, marketers will focus on first-party data, trying to generate traffic from organic search. We will pay more attention to product value and target audience, which we should have done.
Besides, our team started to focus back building community, content marketing, and SEO, which let users who need our help can find our products easily.
Therefore, without cookies, in a way it’s a good thing. (right?)
As a user, I never care about a third-party cookie, to be honest.
I know there is a privacy issue, but I don’t care. If this cookie lets Google promote something I am interested in, I prefer to keep it.
Overall, we still need to wait until 2024 to see if third-party cookies will disappear on Chrome, but now as a marketer, I know I should decrease my reply on it anymore.
