Marketing and cookies: What are the prospects in 2021?

Cookies are an important tool for any marketing specialist. They can be used to find customers, evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, and analyze behavior. All advertising platforms rely on cookies for targeting and tracking purposes. This tool is important for conducting research on customer preferences.

What are cookies?

All browsers are able to save small fragments of user codes as people visit various web resources. These fragments are called cookies. They contain information about users. Specific data may include age, gender, location, interests, and users' behavior on a site or in search engines. Thanks to cookies, you can set up a targeted advertising campaign for specific groups within your target audience.

This is a convenient and practical technology that helps to facilitate a variety of functions.

1. Track purchase status: If any user puts an item into their shopping cart and forgets about it, cookies will tell that they haven't completed their purchase.
2. Configure retargeting: Cookies remind your customers about products and services after they leave your site.
3. Enable the autofill function: Cookies can save the data that a user has previously entered into forms on your site.
4. Save user settings: Using cookies simplifies the process of staying on your site.
5. Record the period of user activity: Cookies can monitor how long a user remains on your site.

There are two common types of cookies:

• First-party cookies: These are created by the site itself, and these files store data about visitors. The main function is to improve the user experience by collecting analytical data.
• Third-party cookies: These are created by sites for marketing purposes. For example, when a user clicks on an ad, third-party cookies come into play.

What is happening with cookies now?

Society has become more concerned about the use and storage of confidential information. Cookies have been criticized for over 10 years. For this reason, Safari and Firefox browsers have started blocking tracking files by default.

In March 2021, Google joined the fight against cookies. The company announced its intention to remove support for third-party files in the Google Chrome browser. This is how the concept of “cookiepocalypse" appeared.

However, marketers were not ready to cancel cookie support. Many people are afraid of problems with setting up ads and a resulting decrease in revenue. However, this problem can be solved by adjusting advertising styles.

Digital advertising without cookies

Blocking cookies doesn`t mean the end of digital advertising. This means that you need to find new ways to replace files for tracking and maintaining communication with users.

1. Contextual advertising by keyword

In this case, all advertising is based on the content that the user views and not on their behavior in general. If a person reads articles about facial care, they see ads for the appropriate products. People don't like advertising. However, if you show them what they are interested in, the value of the offer increases. Contextual advertising doesn't create the feeling that a person is being watched.

2. Individual targeting

Marketing targets specific users, but not a whole group. People may be identified through different channels, but each individual can get access to their own account on any device. This is how large global companies already work. The data is received when a person logs in. This way, marketers can set up unique ads for a specific user and see their reaction to it.

The Evinent Analytics platform is a perfect fit for site owners who want to analyze customer purchasing patterns, assess the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, and allow users to create their own profiles. With our simple tool, you can analyze user behavior and offer your customers products/services that match their interests. This is a great alternative to cookies that allows you to act unobtrusively and purposefully.