Advertisers and marketers have long been relying on third-party cookies to reach their customers through digital channels. This cookie culture created an efficient revenue-generating system for brands but it also affected the most crucial aspect of the customer experience…data privacy.
Since cookies track every individual’s browsing history, cookies allowed companies to gather users’ data without their consent. This practice eventually led to distrust among internet users. 72% of Americans feel that almost all or most of what they do online is being tracked by companies and 81% feel they have little to no control over the data that companies collect about them.
Countering these growing data privacy concerns and the intent to keep the web free and open, Google announced earlier this month that its Chrome browser would no longer provide support for third-party cookies.
What does this Google cookies announcement mean for your brand? More than anything, it’s an important nudge to step up your data privacy game.
What to Do Now That Cookies Are Crumbling
Since the Google cookies announcement, the marketing and advertising industry has been in a state of panic. Eliminating cookies will limit marketers’ abilities to track and acquire new customers, which will certainly incur revenue loss for today’s digitally-dependent brands.
With the phasing out of third-party cookies, the future isn’t totally bleak for brands though. As a matter of fact, this change in digital advertising will lead to stronger first-party relationships in a privacy-first world. These developments are already happening, with 65% of advertisers planning to rely on first-party data.
The message is clear. If you’ve been relying on third-party cookies for all your ads, it is time to focus on building a process that enables efficient first-party data collection across different channels and offers a single view of your customers…without compromising on privacy.
Why You Need Identity Resolution
Identity resolution is a data management process that connects all identifiers associated with an individual to create a 360 customer view. As a brand, when you gain the ability to create a single view of your customers, your marketing team gets immediate access to trustworthy insights.
These insights eventually help your marketing team deliver a seamless experience to your customers. Whether they switch between devices or log in through an app or a browser, identity resolution unifies all of the data within a single customer profile, providing comprehensive insights throughout their customer journey.
Identity resolution allows your marketing team to create valuable first-party data based on specific audiences. This high-quality data brings more benefits to marketers in terms of high-converting users. As a result, marketing has better control over ad spend and customer acquisition costs.
Skypoint Cloud’s Identity Resolution
Gaining genuine marketing insights through a single view of the customer sounds promising. However, identity resolution isn’t as easy as it seems. When a customer profile grows with your brand over time through several purchases and interactions, the record starts getting complicated. With more touch points, it becomes difficult to deliver personalized experiences to your customers.
No matter how large or small the customer base is, you will still have to deal with a lot of unknown and unorganized data in the form of lacking or incomplete phone numbers, e-mails, and other identity keys.
Skypoint Cloud’s customer data platform (CDP) easily resolves these issues with identity resolution. Skypoint uses smart scanning to identify personal data by connecting and analyzing your organization’s data systems and applications.
Our over 200 native data integrations ingest data into the platform. Once data is ingested and cleansed for data quality, our AI/ML-powered identity resolution process stitches your customer data together, safely and precisely creating a customer profile. Your marketing and sales teams can then utilize this 360 customer view to provide protected personalized experiences to your customers.
Put Your Brand in a Better Position Through Data Privacy
Google’s announcement to end support for third-party cookies isn’t necessarily an end to targeted digital advertising. This move is an opportunity for brands to build genuine relationships with customers and audiences who expect their privacy to be respected.
Brands who gather data intelligently while following privacy compliance best practices will be in the best position to weather storms, like Google’s most recent announcement about cookies.
A CDP with identity resolution and privacy at its core will eliminate the need to rely on cookie tracking or third-party data. It will help you unify customer data across disparate sources and offer an opportunity to deliver better customer experiences.
Skypoint Cloud is both a customer data platform and a data privacy platform. Reach out and we’ll show you how Skypoint helps you manage customer data effectively while remaining fully committed to privacy compliance.
