3 Things Marketers and Brands Must do Now for the Post-Tracking Era
Without so many third-party tracking tools, marketers and brands must think about the next steps: rebuild the direct connections with their real customers, protect them, and regain trust.
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Google again announced the plan to end all third-party cookie tracking for user-targeting in the Chrome browser, starting in 2022, and that made many marketers and brands trying their best to keep their business model intact, finding alternative solutions to keep tracking users and deliver ads across websites.
They had made a lot of money by doing so for years and raised concerns about user privacy. For marketers and brands, the bad news is eventually they can no longer track users on such a large scale, using ANY third-party tracking technology, not only for third-party cookies.
First-hand Data Counts
For years, web browsers such as Safari, Firefox, and Brave have introduced many new features to better protect user privacy by blocking multiple technologies for cross-site tracking. And laws like GDPR and CCPA have shown the governments were taking actions for privacy protection.
Furthermore, for tech giants, doing more for user privacy is not only to deal with the political pressure and legal requirements, but also to strengthen their advantage over competitors in the advertising business, since they have way more users than others, so they have the most first hand data directly provided by users. That will make Google, Facebook, and other big aggregators more invincible.
Marketers and brands are devoting themselves to develop alternative technologies to track users, but it turns out that all these will be blocked by upcoming privacy protection tools or banned by the new law. That means less and less you can do for tracking users like before.
The paradigm of digital marketing is shifting now, and the key answer is quite simple. Who has more first-hand user data will win. Marketers and brands have to do the following 3 things to get their own first-hand data:
