Location data provider Factual is launching a new product called Data Enrichment, which supplements first-party data with additional audience insights built on mobile-location and real-world behaviors. The company says this allows companies to a gain deeper understanding of their own customers than first-party data would enable by itself.
CPG brands, automotive, media publishers. I spoke about the new offering with Scott Townsend, Factual’s Head of Data Enrichment and Factual CMO Brian Czarny. Townsend outlined several concrete use cases for the product for CPG brands, automotive marketers and media publishers, among others.
Townsend explained that CPG brands often struggle to get good first-party data from the retailers that sell their products. Factual’s product can show these brands where their customers are shopping. “This helps with personalized messaging,” said Townsend. “The campaign can say, ‘the product is on sale at Costco,’ where the consumer is a frequent shopper.”
Automotive brands can better understand other car makers they’re up against and engage in-market shoppers visiting competitor lots. And media publishers, according to Townsend, “Often struggle to get enough data to make their inventory competitive with the walled gardens. Enrichment provides additional insights for advertisers about publisher audiences,” so they can charge more for their inventory.
Growing appetite for location data among brands. Factual’s Czarny observed, “Brands want to have the complete picture of their customers,” and added that the company is seeing “incredible appetite for location data to build behavioral segments.”
Indeed, location data has been described as a “cookie for the real world.” That idea becomes more significant and not just a marketing concept as browsers shut down third party cookies and privacy regulations make many types of data less available.
I asked Czarny and Townsend, as more brands seek out location data for insights and segmentation capabilities, will CCPA or mobile OS location alerts affect the availability or accuracy of that data? Czarny predicted that iOS 13 would likely have a bigger impact than CCPA in that regard.
Indeed, the Wall Street Journal previously reported, “Since iOS 13 was released in September, tens of millions of people have moved to block apps’ ability to track their locations when not in use.”
But Czarny said that Factual’s access to data had not been significantly impacted. “Near term iOS 13’s impact hasn’t be great for us because we responsibly source the data.” He predicted that wouldn’t be the case for publishers and mobile apps that ask for location without delivering a clear benefit to the user.
Why we care. As privacy forces marketers and brands to develop or better utilize their first party data, data enhancement offerings like Factual’s will become more important. The audience insights gained from location data is an obvious and powerful data-enhancement tool. It remains to be seen, however, how deeply the location intelligence industry is affected by CCPA, OS location alerts and increasing consumer privacy concerns surrounding location.
About The Author
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.
All the signs are that 2020 is going to be a turbulent, challenging year for marketers — digital marketers in particular. That’s the cold reality. But like a New Year’s Day polar bear plunge, a dose of cold reality can be quite bracing and help provide sharpness and clarity. In that spirit, here are three predictions to help you clear your head for the new year.
1. The Cold Reality: Digital will become the new “too big to fail”
I’ve been warning for years that digital would trigger unwanted government oversight if it didn’t get its act together on privacy. Still, I don’t think the government will allow digital to collapse entirely, for the same reason that the government kept the financial sector afloat after the 2008 meltdown. There are simply too many jobs at stake.
Almost all of the revenue at Google and Facebook comes from digital ad dollars. Those companies, along with the remainder of the top five in digital ad revenue — Amazon, Microsoft and Verizon — all wield enormous clout. They will continue to not just survive, but also thrive.
The Hot Take: Most consumers have reasonable expectations
The truth is that most consumers expect a certain amount of their personal information to be shared, and most don’t mind — when it’s done within reason. So I’ll leave you with a dash of optimism. Although the process will be painful, I think eventually regulators will strike a balance between providing reasonable consumer protection and maintaining the status quo in digital.
2. The Cold Reality: TV will never regain its dominance
Another institution once considered “too big to fail” might not be. Just look what’s happening in television. As digital ad spend continued to soar, TV ad spend declined by 2.2% in 2019. And while eMarketer notes that “The presidential election next year will propel TV ad spending back into positive growth, before falling again in the following years,” I’d say even that “positive growth” should come with an asterisk (see my next prediction).
The Hot Take: Even in its diminished state, TV can remain a major player
As TV holds steady in 2020 (and probably 2021), it should gird for a pivotal moment in 2022. That’s when NFL broadcast rights come up for renewal.
To date, the one area where TV has been able to hold its own against digital is in live programming, sports in particular. But if one of the major streaming services makes a concerted bid to carry NFL games — look out.
I have no doubt that TV execs are well aware of the stakes. With two years to prepare, expect them to hold onto those NFL rights at all costs.
3. The cold reality: Digital ads will provide the biggest bang for the political buck
For another measure of TV’s declining influence, let’s take a quick backward glance. In its postmortem on the 2016 election, Fortune reported that Hillary Clinton “placed a far greater emphasis than Donald Trump on television advertising, a more traditional way of reaching swaths of voters. She spent $72 million on TV ads and about $16 million on internet ads in the final weeks.”
Back in April of 2016, I wrote in this space that “candidates have discovered the quickest way to make news is to put out a statement or comment in a social media post.” I noted that Trump, in particular, had mastered the art of using social media as a bully pulpit to generate millions of dollars’ worth of media coverage — for free.
Since then much has been made of the influence that Facebook ads played in the outcome of the 2016 election. Well, Facebook could conceivably play an even bigger role in 2020 — depending on how long they continue to resist efforts to fact-check their political ads.
It’s all about precision targeting — and digital continues to rule on that front. Recently the Trump reelection campaign launched 338 new Facebook ads in one day, most aimed at people 56 and older. Look for those microtargeted Facebook ads in swing states to potentially play a huge role in the 2020 election.
The Hot Take: The volatility surrounding online political ads could be TV’s salvation
No, television can’t touch digital’s precision targeting. The problem for digital is that all that precision targeting, without much accountability, has made digital itself a potential target — of lawmakers spooked by that unchecked influence. We could still see blowback in the form of legislation before Election Day.
In the meantime, it’s not as if TV will lose its influence entirely. When you recall the 2016 election, most of the pivotal moments occurred on TV during debates and other live events. As in sports, live political coverage will remain TV’s trump card. (Sorry — I had to say it.)
No news is good news
I know I’ve painted a pretty gloomy picture here. But that’s the nature of news — you hear a lot more about things that go wrong than the things that go right.
Here’s the flipside: You didn’t hear much about the vast majority of brands and their marketing partners in 2019 because they continue to work quietly to ensure profitability while practicing corporate responsibility and respect for the consumer. And the good news is, I expect that trend to quietly continue throughout 2020.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Lewis Gersh is founder and CEO of PebblePost, guiding corporate strategy and company vision with over 20 years of board and executive management experience.
Prior to PebblePost, Lewis founded Metamorphic Ventures, one of the first seed-stage funds, and built one of the largest portfolios of companies specializing in data-driven marketing and payments/transaction processing. Portfolio companies include leading innovators such as FetchBack, Chango, Tapad, Sailthru, Movable Ink, Mass Relevance, iSocket, Nearbuy Systems, Thinknear, IndustryBrains, Madison Logic, Bombora, Tranvia, Transactis and more.
Lewis received a B.A. from San Diego State University and a J.D. and Masters in Intellectual Property from UNH School of Law. Lewis is an accomplished endurance athlete having competed in many Ironman triathlons, ultra-marathons and parenting.
The emergence of AI-powered martech has given marketers a lot to grapple with the last couple of years. Some have voiced fears of being replaced by automation. Others are excited by the potential time and cost savings.
But with all the hype around new technology, we may have overlooked the most exciting part of the AI revolution.
As traditional marketing shifted into digital marketing over the last decade, we’ve drifted further and further away from the human-to-human interactions that defined customer experience in prior decades.
We’ve turned people into prospects. Views into impressions. We’ve commoditized customers by automating our funnels and flywheels. By scaling our digital activities, we’ve lost a bit of the human touch.
It takes a ton of time and lots of tools to manage a digital marketing campaign. We have to leverage automation to drive results. But the machinery we build can feel cold and impersonal and end up damaging the customer experience.
AI promises to streamline our efforts, automating the repetitive tasks we grind through today, performing massively complex calculations so we don’t have to.
By replacing the technical grind of digital marketing, AI will free marketers to focus on the part of the job that requires the most humanity – engaging and serving customers.
Conversational marketing, data-driven personalization, AI and other trends predict a future where marketers have the time, and the mandate, to focus on real human interactions again. What a time to be a marketer!
Soapbox is a special feature for marketers in our community to share their observations and opinions about our industry. You can submit your own here.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Nathan Binford is the vice president of marketing at MarketChorus, producers of AI-powered solutions for content marketer and publishers. Find more from Nathan on the MarketChorus blog and his personal blog, Inbound Marketing Best Practices.
According to post-holiday sales data, U.S. overall retail sales were flat or up modestly; however, some traditional retailers saw sales declines to varying degrees. By comparison, online sales were up roughly 19% according to data from Mastercard, which said total holiday retail sales increased 3.4% compared with a year ago.
Macy’s, JCPenney, L Brands, Kohl’s and even Target reported disappointing results. Macy’s said it would close nearly 30 stores, while Pier 1 is closing almost half its stores. Total store closures last year exceeded 9,000 locations.
Mindset: Close stores, push e-commerce
Following lower-than-expected in-store sales, the natural impulse for some retailers is: close stores and push e-commerce. And that may make sense in the abstract and in some instances. However too many “omnichannel” retailers don’t fully appreciate the symbiotic relationship between stores and online sales. This is reflected most significantly in the still-frequent bright line separation (often with separate P&Ls) between e-comm and store teams.
Euclid Analytics CEO Brent Franson told me in 2017 that when stores disappear, it hurts online sales as well. (Euclid was acquired by WeWork in early 2019.) I haven’t been able to find further support for that statement, but it makes considerable sense.
In-store returns boost online sales
In an off the record conversation last November, I was told by a digital commerce executive at a major female apparel retailer that the mention of in-store returns in online ads boosted e-commerce sales. Why? Because people will be more inclined to buy “sight unseen” if they’re confident then can return products in store. And according to data compiled by eMarketer, 75% of online shoppers prefer to return products in-store.
An interesting twist on that concept is the partnership between Kohl’s and Amazon. Kohl’s accepts returns of Amazon products in all its stores. Amazon benefits from more than 1,100 “return centers” (Kohl’s stores) across the U.S. For its part, Kohl’s has said that the policy brings younger buyers into the store, who often go on to buy something.
Local search drives e-commerce too
The in-store return of e-commerce products often results in additional sales. People tend to buy more in a store after returning an online product. And easy returns create support and reinforce brand loyalty.
It also goes the other way. LocalSEOGuide’s Dan Leibson said in a phone interview that many of the firm’s big box retail customers see millions of dollars in online sales being driven by local search and Google My Business. In other words, someone looks for a particular branded store “near me” and then clicks through to the website, ultimately buying something online.
“This is a thing for all major retailers,” Leibson explained. “There’s an underreported amount of revenue coming this way.” In fact Leibson believes that major retailers, paradoxically, should be thinking about local search as a potentially significant driver of e-commerce and optimize their pages accordingly.
BOPIS and consumer agnosticism
This phenomenon also plays off the “omnichannel” paradigm. Consumers are relatively agnostic about where they buy something if they’re confident they can take the product back if it’s not right. This is also reflected in the growth of BOPIS (buy online, pick up in store).
As Deloitte has argued in its “2020 retail industry outlook” report, convenience is a major incentive or issue for consumers: “Whether in the store or online, consumers want a friction-free experience, from finding ideas and inspiration to making purchases, managing returns, and advocating for the brand.”
Convenience is king for consumers
Conversely, when a store fails to deliver on that convenience it can damage shopper loyalty and even the reputation of the brand. I had such an experience with Banana Republic over the holiday when I was not permitted to return a shirt purchased online (that didn’t fit) to one of their stores. I won’t be buying anything more from Banana Republic (online or off).
So, while closing underperforming stores makes economic sense for many distressed retailers they should think carefully about which stores they close and not simply assume that customers will shift their buying behavior to the brand’s online shopping cart.
About The Author
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.
LinkedIn rolled out three new Page tools designed to make it easier for businesses to engage with their customers, prospects, and employees on Wednesday.
Invite to Follow. To help businesses grow their communities and reach new audiences, Page Admins are now able to invite first-degree Profile connections to follow their LinkedIn Page. Page admins are limited to sending no more than 50 invites per day, and users have the option to opt-out of receiving invites altogether.
Users can invite first-degree Profile connections to follow their LinkedIn Pages.
LinkedIn Live Streaming. LinkedIn Live, which originally rolled out in beta last February, is now broadly available on Pages. The feature enables businesses to engage in two-way conversations on-screen and through comments with real-time participation through broadcast notifications. Over the next few weeks, LinkedIn said it will be rolling out a “stream targeting” feature that uses third-party tools (including Restream, Wirecast and Socialive), to help brands reach audiences with different languages and locations around the world. LinkedIn has also introduced private testing capabilities for Live Stream, giving brands an opportunity to rehearse and test before going live.
LinkedIn Live streaming is now available for Pages.
Post as Page or Member. With the new updates, Page Admins can choose whether they would like to post as an individual or as their organization. Admins can share an update from their profile, business Page, or directly from the platform’s homepage with a new toggle switch on the homepage.
Page Admins can select whether to post from their personal profile or from their Page.
Why we care. These updates are designed to deliver more value from the community-driven features on the platform to help brands build stronger relationships with followers, customers and employees. The new features give Page admins more ways to streamline posting from specific pages, expand audience reach with the new ‘Invite’ tool, and create impactful connections in a live streaming environment.
About The Author
Taylor Peterson is Third Door Media’s Deputy Editor, managing industry-leading coverage that informs and inspires marketers. Based in New York, Taylor brings marketing expertise grounded in creative production and agency advertising for global brands. Taylor’s editorial focus blends digital marketing and creative strategy with topics like campaign management, emerging formats, and display advertising.
We’re conducting a survey to get more insight on the roles shaping our industry.
More
Is your job title fairly new? What martech tools do you use from day to day? Would you say you are more of an Operations Orchestrator, or an Analytics Architect? Or neither? These are the things we want to know about you.
Please take our 2020 MarTech Career Study to help us get a better understanding of the roles shaping today’s marketing technology organizations. Conducted in partnership with MarTech Conference Chair Scott Brinker, the survey will only take five minutes of your time and will give us all more insight into the work we do as an industry.
Once all the responses have been collected, we’ll be sure to share the results. It is an anonymous survey and includes 18 questions (plus three optional questions) covering topics like:
Which department are you part of?
What are your primary responsibilities?
What martech tools do you use most often?
When was the last time you were promoted?
Please be sure to forward this quiz to your martech colleagues — the more responses we have, the more insights we can share.
About The Author
Amy Gesenhues is a senior editor for Third Door Media, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land, Search Engine Land and MarTech Today. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.
Struggling to see ROI from your martech? Eager to assemble a frictionless organization? Want to deliver user experiences that exceed customer expectations?
Attend The MarTech Conference April 15-17 in San Jose for creative, vendor-agnostic solutions to these and many more complex marketing challenges.
The agenda is liveand ready for you to explore! Join a community of nearly 2,000 senior-level marketers for tactical, practical sessions and return to the office ready to…
√ Deliver measurable results with limited budget and resources
√ Get data quality, integration, and governance right
√ Successfully incorporate agile methods for increased efficiency
√ Infuse martech best practices into your organization
√ Create customer experiences that are personalized, relevant, and effective
√ Evaluate and invest in the technologies that deliver on all of these goals
You’ll soak up inspiration during exclusive keynotes and game-changing insights from experts, including:
I will address both practical and reasonable strategies for marketing operations and technology management — while embracing the promise of exciting, new innovations in my opening keynote, Leading The Next Decade Of Martech.
Digital analyst Brian Solis, SalesForce Principal of Marketing Insights, Mathew Sweezey, and communications expert Nancy Duarte will empower you to leverage AI to improve customer experiences, motivate buyers in an age of infinite media, and use data to tell compelling, humanizing narratives.
Ready to register? Choose the passthat’s right for your goals and budget and book now to enjoy up to $900 off on-site rates:
All Access: Complete access to all conference sessions, keynotes, networking events, exhibitors, sponsor presentations, amenities, and more.
All Access Workshop Combo (best value!): Dive deeper and learn more by adding a half-day, pre-conference workshop to your itinerary.
Expo : Searching for martech tools and services? Focused on growing your network? Pick up a FREE Expo pass to enjoy unlimited Expo Hall access, full-length Solution Track sessions, sponsor presentations in the Discover MarTech Theater, downloadable speaker presentations, refreshments, free WiFi, and more.
Team Rates: MarTech is a fabulous option for your 2020 company outing. Attend as a group for a unique team-building experience and lock in extra savings while you’re at it.
Don’t miss this opportunity to learn practical advice and insights from marketing leaders who have been where you are and are ready to share what it takes to succeed.
I hope to see you there 🙂
Psst… How many marketing technology tools does your organization use? Do you know how they’re organized? Are they organized? Discover the scope and structure of your martech stack and earn the recognition of your peers: Enter the 2020 Stackie Awards!
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Scott Brinker is the conference chair of the MarTech® Conference, a vendor-agnostic marketing technology conference and trade show series produced by MarTech Today’s parent company, Third Door Media. The MarTech event grew out of Brinker’s blog, chiefmartec.com, which has chronicled the rise of marketing technology and its changing marketing strategy, management and culture since 2008. In addition to his work on MarTech, Scott serves as the VP platform ecosystem at HubSpot. Previously, he was the co-founder and CTO of ion interactive.
While search engine optimization is still one of the most important disciplines to master, pay-per-click advertising is equally essential as a skill.
No matter if a brand is looking to attract B2B or B2C prospects, PPC is one of the most effective means of achieving this goal. That said, there is a vast chasm that separates the tactics employed for optimizing each type of campaign.
Understanding these differences, as well as the necessary PPC audience targeting strategies, is what will enable sellers to reach the right consumers.
To help delineate the necessary knowledge around the differences in B2B and B2C advertisements, today, we will explore the disparities, similarities and relevant tactics for using PPC ads to connect with buyers on both ends of the spectrum.
Targeting tactics
When initiating an advertising campaign, one of the primary considerations is how to reach the right consumers. After all, if a brand is selling homeowner’s insurance, targeting those in the 18-24 age bracket is likely to produce paltry results.
Take a look at the targeting categories in Google Ads:
Speaking to B2B advertisers, a prime tactic for ensuring that the right individuals are reached is to use social media ads to target by company position. Instead of targeting users by their age or interests as a B2C campaign might, a better route would be to target users based on their job title or industry via LinkedIn or Facebook.
However, where some overlap exists is that utilizing features like Lookalike Audiences can help both B2B and B2C brands find new users who are potentially interested in what the company offers.
No matter if targeting the average consumer or business leaders, brands should create buyer personas to better understand who they are trying to reach.
Another of the main differences in B2B and B2C advertising is that B2C sellers are trying to gain purchases as quickly as possible. However, with B2B, advertisers are attempting to generate business leads and ensure their product is considered in the prolonged purchase cycle.
To achieve this goal, brands must consider the timing of their ads.
In B2B advertising, businesses are trying to reach the key players within a company, those who make decisions or are closely connected to those with such power. This means that running ads within the nine-to-five timeframe is critical as this is when these individuals are actively engaged and show the highest intent to click-through.
While B2C consumers can potentially be targeted around the clock, the same is not true for B2B prospects. Instead, ads intended to reach business prospects should only run during business hours, not only for the aforementioned reason but also because this will help to conserve the business’s PPC budget.
Given this framework, brands should employ ad scheduling and bid modifications to alter bids for certain days of the week (Monday through Friday) and times of the day. For example, if advertisers notice that they receive the highest amount of click-throughs on Tuesday mornings, it is wise to increase the cost-per-click during this window.
To do this in Google Ads simply go to Ad schedule and click Bid adjustment for whichever time frame you want to increase or decrease:
While some sellers might feel equipped to manage such tasks, most will see more benefit from partnering with an e-commerce PPC management firm that can maximize potential impressions, clicks and conversions.
Messaging modifications
Much like targeting and timing, there are substantial differences in how advertisers will speak to B2B and B2C audiences.
The fact is that B2B buyers want to engage with brands that have evident expertise and knowledge of a given industry. This means that advertisers must showcase their acumen through relevant terminology, awareness of processes and similar traits that prospects will be interested in seeing.
For instance, if a CRM software provider is looking to reel in new users, but utilizes fluffy, emotionally-driven copy to do so, there is a significant chance that they will not engage the folks they are truly after. Instead, it is necessary to build confidence in potential users with more formal, fact-based messaging that has clear implications of how a product can improve business performance.
Take a look at how Intel communicates with its audience:
However, the exact inverse is true for B2C ads. When targeting average consumers, brands are wise to employ the most relatable voice possible by utilizing straightforward language that mirrors the audience. There is little to no place for jargon in B2C advertising.
Contrary to Intel, Gerber Childrenwear’s audience of mainly parents would appreciate copy like this:
Moreover, B2C ads should trigger emotions in consumers. Neil Patel speaks to this point, writing: “An analysis of 1,400 successful ad campaign case studies found that campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31 percent vs. 16 percent) as those with only rational content.”
This is a crucial dichotomy to recognize when producing B2B and B2C ads.
Negative keyword distinctions
In addition to targeting the audience on their proper characteristics, both B2C and B2B advertisers must understand what elements to exclude in order to reach the most relevant consumers.
The fact is that negative keywords are extremely helpful in weeding out irrelevant searches that eat up advertisers’ budgets. Naturally, the keywords and negative keywords that sellers employ are highly dependent on their specific industry and niche; however, there are some through lines that can be established for both B2B and B2C advertising efforts.
For instance, B2B brands offering a technological solution might want to exclude phrases that are commonly paired with the term “technology” such as:
Careers
Jobs
Hiring
Laws
Reviews
Free
Similarly, B2C retailers who sell new products can also immediately disqualify specific words and phrases that are not applicable to their efforts, such as:
Commercial
Bulk
Used
To do this in Google Ads go to Keywords and click Negative Keywords
However, to get to the core of which terms a business should add to their negative keyword lists, it is best to consult Google’s search term report to uncover phrases that drive impressions and clicks but are wholly irrelevant or fail to convert.
Despite all the differences between B2B and B2C advertising methodologies, there are some commonalities that the two marketing efforts share.
Shared traits
While B2B and B2C ads can be quite different, there are some core components to each that remain the same.
For instance, no matter which type of audience is the target, it is necessary for advertisers to conduct in-depth keyword research to understand which terms and phrases will reach their customers.
Similarly, when advertising through Google, relevance is a significant component of campaign success. Therefore, utilizing compelling landing pages that closely match the ad’s offer is necessary for both B2B and B2C spaces. When there is congruence between an ad and its destination, campaigns will earn a higher quality score.
Moreover, given that consumers are prone to shopping cart abandonment and that B2B customers require a more extended courting period than other types of consumers, developing a retargeting strategy is also a fundamental aspect of campaign success shared across B2B and B2C efforts.
Bagsy decided to utilize Facebook for their retargeting efforts:
While there are plenty of differences between targeting everyday consumers and business prospects, when it comes right down to it, PPC best practices remain intact no matter who is being targeted.
No matter if ads are used in the B2B or B2C realm, it is vital for advertisers to understand the audiences to which they speak. This means that developing buyer personas and conducting market research are key elements for promoting the awareness needed to employ the right language, messaging, targeting tactics and other vital PPC campaign components.
Once this crucial piece of information has been procured, use the strategies outlined above to help your ad campaign reach and resonate with its respective buyers.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Ronald Dod is the chief marketing officer and co-founder of Visiture, an end-to-end e-commerce marketing agency focused on helping online merchants acquire more customers through the use of search engines, social media platforms, marketplaces and their online storefronts. His passion is helping leading brands use data to make more effective decisions in order to drive new traffic and conversions.
Third-party cookies have been living on borrowed time, given their increasing rejection by the major browsers. And today Google announced support for third-party cookies in its Chrome browser would be phased out “within two years.”
The company seeks to replace them with a browser-based mechanism as part of its “Privacy Sandbox” initiative. The Privacy Sandbox was introduced last August, following an earlier announcement at Google I/O. The initiative is arguably a response to increasing privacy pressure and partly a response to the rise of cookie-blocking by others.
Balancing personalization and privacy. Google’s stated objective is to create “a secure environment for personalization that also protects user privacy.” Google says this requires “new approaches to ensure that ads continue to be relevant for users, but user data shared with websites and advertisers would be minimized by anonymously aggregating user information, and keeping much more user information on-device only.”
The company argues that “large scale cookie blocking,” such as being done by Firefox and Safari, encourage tracking techniques like fingerprinting and undermine the publisher ecosystem by making ads less relevant, thereby reducing their revenues. The less precise the audience targeting, the lower the ad revenue.
Audience targeting strategies. The Privacy Sandbox system envisions targeting and conversion measurement happening within the browser environment through “privacy preserving APIs.” Google says that for ad targeting it’s “exploring how to deliver ads to large groups of similar people without letting individually identifying data ever leave [the] browser.” The company explains this is based on techniques and technologies such as Differential Privacy and Federated Learning. The latter would allow interest-based targeting at large-group scale to avoid revealing any individual’s information.
Conversion measurement. Here Google is more vague, saying, “Both Google and Apple have already published early-stage thinking to evaluate how one might address some of these use cases.” Reportedly, conversions would also be tracked inside Chrome and advertisers would be able to get conversion data through an API but without identifying any individual user.
Finally, Google said that starting in February, it’s going to treat cookies “that don’t include a SameSite label as first-party only, and require cookies labeled for third-party use to be accessed over HTTPS.” It’s also going to work to stop fingerprinting and other types of “covert tracking.”
Why we care. Google’s move, together with Firefox and Safari, is a major change (and challenge) for the industry. Google says it’s trying to find “a middle way” that empowers users but enables the advertising ecosystem to function effectively,” compared to what it considers the more blunt approach of Apple’s “Intelligent Tracking Prevention.”
Critics will accuse Google of trying to assert more control over digital advertising. However, for the approach to work, Google will need to build consensus among a broad community of publishers, advertisers, technology companies and even Apple and Mozilla. In principle, at least, it’s a thoughtful and reasonable approach that also plays to its strengths — a vast ecosystem coupled with powerful data collection and modeling capabilities — and will preserve its dominant position in the digital ad market.
About The Author
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.
Email optimization and deliverability go hand-in-hand when it comes to sending emails, and that’s why MarTech Today created the very first resource for marketing professionals that encompasses the elements of both. The Periodic Table of Email Optimization and Deliverability is a comprehensive resource designed to guide you through the different elements required to keep your emails out of the spam folder and in front of your subscribers.
Explore this new resource with its architect, Jennifer Cannon, Senior Editor at MarTech Today, and April Mullen, Director of Strategic Insights at SparkPost, co-founder of Women of Email during this free webinar. They’ll be taking a look at some of the emerging elements and trends that brands and email marketers need to embrace in 2020, including:
What you need to know about BIMI (Brand Indicators for Messaging Identification)
Artificial Intelligence vs Machine Learning for email marketers
How Voice Assistants will play into how email marketers develop emails this year
Compliance — what you need to know about GDPR, CCPA and maintaining a compliant data set
The impact of AMP for Email on brands’ email marketing efforts
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Marketing Land is a daily publication covering digital marketing industry news, trends, strategies and tactics for digital marketers. Special content features, site announcements and occasional sponsor messages are posted by Marketing Land.
Struggling to see ROI from your martech? Eager to assemble a frictionless organization? Want to deliver user experiences that exceed customer expectations?
