GDPR came into force in 2018, being universally feared by digital, marketing and customer experience professionals. At the time, it was difficult to grasp the business impact. The announced end of third-party cookies on Chrome in 2023 seems to pose similar problems.
Beyond the GDPR or the e-privacy directive, the use of third-party cookies was already limited by being blocked by default on Safari and iOS 14 for the Apple ecosystem, or by Mozilla for its Firefox browser. With the end of access to this third-party data on Chrome ( accounting for two-thirds of the search engine market), the decision by Google will bring permanent change.
"The impact is likely to be significant; not only for digital marketing and advertising activities that are solely based on traditional methods of analysis and tracking, but also for those personalisation strategies that rely entirely on AI and machine learning." says Benoît Chovet, Sales Engineering Director at ReachFive. However, under the imperative to deliver ROI, managers may not be fully aware of the current actions to be taken to anticipate these changes.
What are the alternatives ?
Just like the introduction of the GDPR, the end of third-party cookies is an opportunity to reinvent. Certainly, the market will see alternatives: the analysis of the behaviour of Internet users, the ability to reach them again, and the measurement of the performance of these actions. But in the future, companies that are able to develop a real strategy for collecting and using proprietary data - in particular through the use of CIAM (customer access and identity management) - will have the advantage.
It is not a simple matter of pushing a user to create an account and log in so that their profile can be attached to a route. As Benoît Chovet explains, authentication does not mean consent, and not all data is equal:
"As powerful as machine learning can be, the insights you get from a user's online activities and behavior remain probabilistic data. Nothing is more powerful and relevant than the information, and related consents to use it, provided by the customers themselves. This is the deterministic nature of zero-party data. Of course you can’t expect your customers to fill out registration forms that are 3 pages long. That’s where progressive profiling comes into play: asking for additional information in the relevant context, so that the users become more likely to provide it. The key word here is relevancy.”
A CIAM makes it possible to centralise this information continuously and to feed it securely and in real time into a CRM, CDP or marketing automation tool. It is a proven approach: according to Forrester, companies such as the retail group Adéo or gaming retailer Micromania / Zing have benefited from a 333% ROI, a 15% increase in account creation and an increase in revenue of $2.2 million after three years of using Rechfive’s CIAM solution! In the next few articles in this series, we'll look at how to achieve these results with zero-party data and the ReachFive solution.
What are the solutions for managing consent and personal data enrichment? This is what we will present to you in our second article.
If you would like to receive more information, advice and/or a demonstration of our offer, our expert Matthew is ready to discuss with you during a free 15-minute call.
Matthew Thresh
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