Personalization in a Cookie-less Future
The following cartoon captures perfectly the challenge marketers and digital departments face with cookies. Let us unpack this cartoon a bit before discussing the implications and thinking about a cookie-less future in digital experiences. This cartoon perfectly depicts not only the challenge with cookies, but also how I’ve experienced Marketing departments and product teams think about fixing or getting around the “problem” of a cookie-less future.
So what’s the “problem” with cookies anyway?
The “problem” with cookies really is not the cookie itself. At the end of the day, cookies are simply a type of technology solution and not a customer or business issue. We need to re-frame the cookie issue and restate it as a data privacy and anonymity issue. Just because a visitor comes to your website does not give you the right to follow that person for the rest of her life or to keep targeting her. Obviously, GDPR caused us all to look at customer data and privacy in a new light. But we should not just consider privacy an issue that arises in a particular geography or domain. Let us review some statistics that show what consumers think about the issue conducted by Cisco and RSA:
Let us view a few examples that reinforce these concepts. One a video created by a journalist and two personal anecdotes. You might relate to the examples below, and possibly even strike at some of your heart strings:
- Video: Geoffrey A. Fowler of the Washington Post wrote an article Is Firefox better than Chrome? It comes down to privacy. - The Washington Post and created the following video. In this video a guy is followed around the internet marking everything he has done via “cookies”. This video succinctly explains how consumers view the creepiness of being followed with cookies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18En4NBbw3c
- Personal: Last year, I hung out with my family at a reunion and we chatted about an upcoming vacation to Disney. Shortly, thereafter, both Alexa, or the virtual assistant in my family’s home from Amazon, and YouTube, on my personal computer, started showing me ads for Disney. My entire family noticed and reacted strongly about Amazon/Google “listening in on our conversation.” A few months later, for my dad’s next birthday, I gave him some “smart” light switches and he point blank refused to take them. He did not want Alexa “listening in to him”.
- Business: I work with B2B companies, and part of that work includes with law firms on personalization. In some industries, like Healthcare, Banking and Legal, there are major implications to how we personalize. I always give this example to my “law firm clients” to help them understand what is “creepy” personalization. For example, if I am a company, interested in Bankruptcy, and then you start cookie-ing and personalizing Bankruptcy content for me, that could have major legal implications.
While the above examples provide what some may consider extreme illustations, I would imagine that most readers can relate to each much of what I outlined above. So given the consumer concerns around data and privacy, all brands—regardless or region or laws—feel pressure to ensure transparency around data collection. Brands also know they must respect the trust that users give them when they hand over personal information.
On the other hand, web browsers more than any other product or brand, allow consumers access to the internet. So, how browsers handle and allow our data captured governs how websites can capture our data. And cookies are an easy elimination to aid in the proper collection and sharing of data between companies.
The Plan for Cookies by Browser
To understand the future of cookies and user privacy in the digital world, we must understand how individual web browsers plan to treat the issue. Apple (Safari) took one of the first and so far the most aggressive stand against cookies. But unlike Apple and Firefox, as the video suggested, Google’s revenue comes from ads, and hence, they are lagging behind the rest. Google has committed to the elimination of 3rd party cookies by 2023. Here’s a table with an overview of how each browser is handling 1st party cookies, 3rd party cookies, the percentage of users, and when these changes take effect.
So overall, Safari and Firefox are the only 2 mainstream browsers today that block 3rd party cookies, and Safari is the only one also expiring 1st party cookies. But the biggest share by far of internet traffic goes to Chrome that is not blocking 1st or 3rd party cookies yet, but will be by 2023.
The Effect of Cookies (and lack thereof) on Personalization
Now that we reviewed the future of cookies, let us turn to look at the impacts the changes will mean for the MarTech space. The two main MarTech domains affected by cookie changes are analytics and personalization. Though these two disciplines go hand-in-hand, our focus within this article remains personalization.
The elimination of 3rd party cookies is by far more aggressive by browsers, as compared to 1st party cookies, so let’s chat about the browsers first. Personalization using 3rd party cookies is referred to as retargeting or remarketing. If you never heard this term before, watch the video above. With the elimination of cookies, the retargeting space must significantly change. Google, for example, is working on a replacement for 3rd party cookies called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) that eliminates personal data by clustering large groups of people with similar interests. You can read more about it here: https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/2021-01-privacy-sandbox/
1st-party cookies, on the other hand, rely on data a company itself collects about its own users and thus, are used for personalization on its own site. This means remembering the user when he or she comes back to a site and showcasing content/experiences based on previous interactions, behaviors, and data provided by the user. So, with the elimination or even quick expiration of 1st-party cookies (such as in the case of Safari), the following types of Personalization become difficult:
- Progressive Profiling is used to get more information about the user over time. If you must keep forgetting the visitor after a few visits, it becomes difficult to profile them over time. Basically, you would be starting over each time.
- Progressive profiling is one aspect of Explicit Personalization. The broader explicit personalization looks at any data a user gives you explicitly, including form fills, choices made on the site, search content, etc. Without cookies, linking your current session to data given in prior sessions will not be possible. This means that the user experience starts over each session, and the data requested by sites will become repetitive for users.
- Behavioral or Implicit Personalization, including Recommendations: As an antithesis to Explicit Personalization, where the visitor gives you their data, implicit personalization is learning about the visitor, their interests, and behaviors based on their actions. Implicit Personalization can range from Recommendations of products or content to next best action. Without cookies, behavioral personalization can only apply within the same user session or a single user session. Implicit personalization is more affected than explicit personalization with cookie elimination or forced expiration because building an anonymous user profile takes time and traffic. The more time and the more traffic the better the profile. Starting over means it will be difficult and near impossible to build good models for anonymous users and provide exceptional personalized experiences.
Let us briefly survey the types of Personalization not affected by cookies and their elimination or expiration:
- Contextual Personalization is your digital fingerprint, and includes query string parameters, referrers, and your ip address, which can be used to derive geolocation and even your company information. You can get contextual information in every session of the user. So, you could personalize by external campaigns, including ads targeted, email content, and location.
- Real-Time Personalization: All the personalization types listed above can also work within the user session, or until the expiration date of the cookie. So, if you can get the user to keep coming back throughout a 7 day period—even in Safarai—you can continue building on their profile explicitly or implicitly.
- Logged in Experiences: Once a user is logged in, cookies have lesser meaning as the data is stored server side. Any recommendations or personalization that you do in a logged in experience can use server-side data, which means those experiences remain intact regardless of cookie policies and changes.
Personalization Strategy without Cookies
Creating amazing context-driven experiences are table-stakes in today’s data-driven digital world. Customer experience no superseded both price and product, for what consumers value most (Walker Study), and effective personalization can play a huge role in driving amazing experiences. Because negative examples have deeper emotional jolts than positive ones, here is how I position personalization. Imagine, if you will, going to a furniture store in search of a dining table. The sales representative comes back talking to you about couches, end tables, beds. But all you want is a dining room table. That experience will very quickly turn tiresome and frustrating. With our experiences turning more digital every moment, our websites, emails, and social channels are our sales representatives, you can no longer afford to provide a generic experience when your customers expect you to know them, their interests, and their wishes. Personalized content can provide more relevant content to consumers, saving them time, money, and frustration.
Off my soap box now, regardless of cookies, personalization will remain an imperative within digital experiences for the foreseeable future. But remember, only Apple has taken a stab at expiring 1st party cookies. From a market-share perspective that equals only 18% of the traffic. The rest of 82 % of traffic should have no change or no intended change to their cookie based personalized experiences. However, that 18% cannot be ignored. So here are some tips, tricks, and tactics to aid in a focused personalized experience with quickly expiring 1st party cookies.
- Using Context and Real-time Personalization: When you know nothing about a user, it is their first time on your website, most sites display default content which generally is a disparate fragmented experience. However, even for first time visitors, there is a lot of information to be gained from their context: How did they get to your site? What was their referrer? Where did they land? What did they do? What content are they viewing and do they search for anything while on your site? Using these context clues does not require cookies and is one of the most effective means of personalization as it is focused on the current experience of the user. For example, a user coming from google search, looking at a particular article helps you know immediately what the user is interested in, and you can quickly make an assumption of what search term they may have used to land there. Now you can use that context on every other page of the site to focus the user based on their interest.
- Strategy to Convert to Known User: With a quick expiration of 1st party cookies, it’s essential to know the customer and store data about them server-side in order to tie their sessions and experiences together. This makes the strategy to convert them to a known user essential. Companies have found fun ways to turn anonymous visitors to known users, and here are some great examples:
1) Renewal by Andersen, Sephora and many other manufacturing and retail companies have made use of AR to tie customer experiences in with their products. Once you have engaged the user in this way, it might be easy to ask the user to create an account or enter an email address to save the product they have designed or selected. In addition to retail companies, even companies B2B manufacturing companies, like Nucor, have tools to design their products before buying.
2) In the professional services realm, companies like Datto have calculators and other tools to aid in selecting the right service. Datto, specifically, has a budget calculator to figure out how much you should be spending on accounting services. This calculator is of course designed to help the company figure out how much to spend, but it also allows Datto to tailor the rest of the user’s experience based on the company’s budget. They would never show a large-scale, enterprise product or service to a small, incubator startup company.
These companies have figured out not just how to gain user data but also provide relevant and fun experiences to the customer.
- Using Omni-channel experiences to keep them coming back for more: Once you have some user information, your website goes from being the only channel to just one channel. Keep the users coming back every 7 days, by interacting with them on email, social, mobile and other available channels. Cookies are only one way to tie back data. One of my clients uses a unique id in email to tie links from email to the website back to the user. These ids are unique and change every time.
- The Importance of a Logged-In Experience: Without cookies, as already stated, a logged in experience is essential. Customer portals are no longer just for customers. Prospects benefit just as much from peer feedback, reviews, etc., and you can quickly create that connection with them. Companies like American Bankers Association has content available to anonymous users, content available to logged in users, and content available only to customers, creating a 3-way view of one portal.
- Adobe’s Segment Match: Adobe is letting brands share non-sensitive segment data between like or complimentary brands to expand their first party dataset. The example Adobe offers includes a hair products and accessories company sharing with a skincare company so that information from one can enhance the personalization in the other. Again, where it might be difficult to build these holistic profiles quickly or completely in a short period of time, Adobe’s strategy can enhance those profiles of the user in an anonymous or implicit setting.
In Summary
My passion and interest in this article stems from the question I get asked most of all in any personalization workshop or presentation. What about cookies? In summary:
Are cookies disappearing?
Yes and no. 3rd party cookies seem to be by 2023 at least, but not 1st party cookies for the most part. Except for Apple Safari, where 1st party cookies expire in 7 days.
So what can we do?
Before 3rd party cookies disappear, Google’s FLoC and other algorithms with replace them in the AdTech world
For 1st party cookies and your own website personalization, here are strategies to aid in personalized targeted contextual experiences:
1) Contextual and Real-time Personalization
2) Innovative means to convert to a known user
3) Omni-channel experiences to keep your users coming back for more
4) Logged in Experiences for Prospects
5) Adobe’s Segment Match
Will this solve user concerns?
At the end of the day, it is not about cookies. It is about data and how we use it. Remember, the privacy of the user, how they want their data shared. Ensure you are transparent, and always think about the user, their commitment and what they want before what you need. These principles will aid in creating amazing, personalized experiences regardless of the outlook on cookies.
