If you haven’t made plans already, it’s time to start finding alternatives to your retargeting campaigns. Sometime soon, Google will be ending support for third-party cookies in their Chrome browser, which will effectively spell the end of most retargeting marketing programs. Here are 3 alternatives to consider.
Cookies
A quick primer on retargeting, cookies and other terms:
- Cookies are small bits of code that are downloaded from websites you visit that store information in your web browser like the items in your shopping cart, your language preference, or your login information.
- First-party Cookies are cookies from the site you are currently visiting. For example, when I’m on the Starbucks website and it downloads a cookie to track my purchase, that’s a first-party cookie.
- Third-party Cookies are cookies from websites other than the one you are visiting. These are typically downloaded by companies that place ads on the sites you are visiting and used to track your online activity. For example, when you visit yourlocalnews.com and they have ads on their site supplied by doubleclick.net, you will end up with a doubleclick.net cookie on your browser.
Retargeting
Retargeting is an effective marketing technique that relies on third-party cookies. Let’s say you visited yourlocalnews.com and now you have a third-party cookie on your browser. Then you visit bestbuy.com and click on a new TV you have been curious about.
You then leave bestbuy.com and go to cnn.com. Suddenly on CNN’s website you will see an ad for the exact TV you were just looking at. That’s because the third-party cookie downloaded to you from yourlocalnews.com is tracking the websites you visit and the things you are interested in. When you arrive at a website that uses the same ad network, the information in that third-party cookie can be accessed and used to tailor the ads/content to your tastes.
You are more likely to click on the ad because it is for a product you are interested in…and because of affiliate relationships, if you click on the ad and buy the product, the site where you clicked on the ad will get a commission on the purchase.
Retargeting is why you see the same product following you around the Internet. Retargeting is also how some smaller publishers (ie: bloggers) make enough to sustain their businesses.
If you want to read more about cookies and retargeting, here is a great post from clearcode.
Privacy Concerns
In recent years, governments in the EU, California and other jurisdictions around the world have begun enacting stricter privacy laws to protect citizens from having their Internet activity tracked without their explicit knowledge or consent.
The cookie provision in the latest GDPR rules from the EU, for example, requires that a website clearly and explicitly state to a visitor, what cookies are being used, how the information will be used and obtain consent before downloading them to a user’s browser. That’s why you see so many websites with cookie notifications when you first visit them.
Laws like GDPR will only get stricter in the years ahead and the consensus is that third-party cookies will soon be prohibited. Apple’s Safari web browser and Mozilla’s Firefox browser have already ended support for third-party cookies. Google’s Chrome browser is one of the last.
Retargeting alternatives
When Google ends its support, it will effectively end retargeting as a viable marketing campaign. So what alternatives do you have? The answer: nothing will directly replace retargeting, but there are several things you can do to replace the clickthrus that will be going away with third-party cookies.
- Focus on personalizing your website and using first-party cookies
- Leverage social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. and Google
- Partner with sites that cater to your target audience
- Keyword advertising
- Implement Facebook’s first-party cookie
Focus on your website
In some ways, retargeting was an effective alternative to implementing your own behavioral tracking of website visitors. Instead of investing in good website design or a marketing automation platform to track visitor behavior on your own website, you could just pay for retargeting campaigns and achieve the results.
But now that retargeting is going away, it’s time to invest in behavioral tracking on your own website. You know your corporate blog…are you tracking the topics that visitors are clicking on and adding that information to the visitor’s profile? Once you have that information you could then tailor the offer/CTA on your site to match what that visitor is interested in.
For example, say a visitor has been reading a lot of your blogs about interoperability. If you track that information in your marketing automation tool via your first-party cookie (which is okay as long as you obtain consent from the visitor to download a first-party cookie), then you could change the ads you display to that visitor when they go to a new page on your site. Instead of the generic book-a-demo button in the top nav bar, you could offer them your interoperability whitepaper instead.
Leverage social platforms
The end of third-party cookies will result in social platforms becoming even more important to advertisers.
Without third-party cookies, social platforms are the only ones who will have intimate knowledge of people’s likes, dislikes and interests. Using the hyper-targeting capabilities of these platforms means that your ad will be seen only by those people who are in your target market. LinkedIn and Facebook already offer an amazing level of granularity when it comes to placing your ads on their platforms.
If you aren’t already advertising on these platforms, you may want to start experimenting with them now.
Partner with sites that cater to your target audience
This alternative should really be labelled: go where your audience is. This could mean news sites, healthcare publications [disclosure: we are one], association newsletters, podcasts, YouTubers, etc. So rather than relying on an advertising network to place your ad in front of someone who has shown interest in a retargeting program, you can place an ad directly in front of your target audience.
Of course it’s not all about ads. You can also partner to co-create content or be featured in stories.
Keyword advertising
What’s old is new again. Keyword advertising has fallen a little out of favor in recent years, but with the looming changes, it may be time to go back to this form of advertising. It can be especially effective when combined with localized keyword targeting.
Facebook’s first-party cookie (aka pixel)
For years, marketers could leverage the power of Facebook’s behavioral knowledge and profile information by implementing their pixel on websites. A few years ago, Facebook changed how their pixel worked – moving it from using third-party cookies to first party cookies.
Here is a succinct description from clearcode.cc
- A user clicks an ad on Facebook. A unique string is appended to the link.
- The user is redirected to the advertiser’s landing page. Prior to that, the site must at some point display a consent box enabling its visitors to consent to the pixel sharing the first-party cookie data with Facebook.
- The URL is interpreted by the pixel installed on the advertiser’s site. The URL parameter is stored in the user’s browser as a first-party cookie.
- The pixel installed on the site communicates with Facebook and sends back the data stored by the first-party cookie.
Using Facebook’s cookie means your website can be tailored (ie: personalize) their experience on their site. This is fantastic since Facebook will gather much more information on a user than a single website ever could. The cookie is also very powerful when combined with Facebook’s look-alike audience feature.
Other Technologies
Google itself is working on an alternative to third-party cookies – one in which users have more control and knowledge of what information is being collected about them. The system is based on APIs and Trust Tokens. You can read more about it here.
Others have proposed their own versions of persistent IDs, where users would voluntarily identify themselves so that their behavior can be tracked from website to website. Presumably this would be in return for (a) a better user experience on websites and (b) for better offers.
There has also been talk about advertiser marketplaces where user behavioral data can be sold and purchased by advertisers.
Pragmatic advice
Over the past few months, I have been casually asking various members of the HITMC Community how they are planning for the end of retargeting. The most pragmatic answer I have received was from Lea Chatham, Director of Marketing Programs at SR Health:
“We do still use cookies to some degree and we still do retargeting but what I would say is that we have tried to build a pretty broad approach to marketing so that when things like this happen, the impact isn’t huge. That allows us to shift that bit of budget and move it somewhere else to make up any losses. We see this sometimes when the Google algorithm changes too. Drops in organic traffic or something like that. Because we use a lot of tactics and test a lot of things, we can always find a way to recover that loss. One change doesn’t totally throw us.”
What are your plans?
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