The Cookieless Future Is Here: Here's What to Do About It

0:00Alright, so we're going to talk about how the cookie list future is here and what to actually do about it. Neil, if you're a small business, do nothing about it. Not what you want to hear, but it's the reality. Do you think Google and all these social networks and platforms that make billions of dollars are really going to make it where you can't track any of your conversions and data? No. If you think about a lot of the transactions you get on Google, it's in their ecosystem. You're still going to see a lot of conversions, but it's not going to be as good as it used to be. If you're a large corporation, you should do something.

0:35and you need to start working on your data analytics, start bringing in all your data into one place, whether you want to use Google Data Studio or Tableau or whatever it is that you want to end up using, start integrating in there, creating your own customer journey, start segmenting and figuring out patterns and analyzing data to figure out how you maximize your conversion rate. Yep. So there's this concept known as first party data, third party data. Third party data would be like when you're using a third party data source, right? So when you're advertising on Facebook or when you used to do it, right?

1:07Now, first party is the data that you have, right? It could be like an email that you collect. And so because we're moving more into a cookie list future, in a couple episodes ago, we talked about why newsletters are making a comeback. Can you own your data when it comes to SMS, your SMS list? Can you own your data when it comes to your email list as well? And whatever else that you're doing. And so I had a friend tell me about a technology called fingerprint.js. So if you go to fingerprint.com, you can actually verify the identity of people visiting your website and see the behaviors that they have.

1:36And then you can trigger certain events based on what it is that they're doing on your website. And so that way you have more control over the elements of your funnel versus before you're kind of just relying on the advertising engines to help optimize and drive conversions for you. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but we're moving into a world where we're moving away from easy mode and it's going back into hard mode, which I think is a net positive for everyone because marketing should never be that easy. No, it should never be that easy. I actually like it and I'm a little bit biased because we're an ad agency, which means more people are going to be reliant on us to help or other companies who can help them with their data and analytics.

2:13it doesn't mean you need to hire Eric or me. More so, what you need to do is start passing in data from all your different channels into one place so that way you can make better informed decisions. Whether it's a newsletter or using SMS marketing, whatever you're using, you need to start passing your data into one central place so that way you can start mapping out the customer journey better and make better informed decisions. If you don't do that, you're gonna be screwed. It's just a question of when. I think we should maybe map out a timeline for people too. I mean, because all this stuff's having, you know, the move to GA4, like, but by the way, I don't know about you, Neil, but like looking at GA4, it's just a crippled version of Google analytics and they're just removing a lot of stuff.

2:54Yes. I feel GA4 sucks compared to the old GA, I think GA3, I'm going to use in the numbers, not because GA4 doesn't have features, but like Eric said, it's just a crippled down version. And when you're looking at third party cookies, they were supposed to be gone at the end of 2023. Now it's looking like it's going to be gone by the end of 2024. Google Analytics, just so you think about our behavior in the past. So when I used to go over to Neil's house, the one page he would almost always have up is Google Analytics. Like his laptop would always just have Google Analytics on it. So there's a time and day where we would just be a little neurotic and we probably checked analytics a little too much.

3:31But the reason we did was because you can segment so much, you can slice and dice the data. There's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with it where it's actual helpful insight. And even back in the day when you can see all the keyword, all the search data, where you can see specific keywords people are looking for, that was like ultimate helpful, right? And we're going into a world where more and more stuff is being taken away. So that means you have to take control. We talk about the focus on first party data, but also how do you build relationships with your customers too, right? Well, if you want to avoid a cookie-less future, if you want to think about reaching your customers in a cookie-less future, you want to think about how you can build a relationship with them, right?

4:06So that comes down to how you go about servicing them, how you go about helping them in terms of content, and then also maybe building even a community around this stuff, which is why a lot of people are talking about, oh, build a newsletter and then build a community. You can build a community through an event, right? And a quick list future, to our point earlier, also forces creativity. And so the creative marketers aren't so much worried versus the ones that maybe just relied a little too much on the ad platforms. One last thing from my side. So contextual targeting too. So contextual targeting is basically a way of when you're running ads, you're basically targeting ads based on the content on the page that a user is viewing.

4:42And so that's a little more privacy friendly. Like you can do that if you're going to continue to run ads. I don't think we're going to stop running ads by any means. So that's going to be a way of moving forward. But all the things that we talked about here, I would recommend re-listening to this episode because this is going to come faster than you know. And it's good to be prepared. Like people prepared the hell out of GDPR. This is actually worth preparing for because it's going to help you grow your business long-term. GDPR was more so to protect your business. So different things. So that is it for today.

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