The digital marketing world is changing. Again. Here's what you need to know.
Have you heard about this?
The internet browsers (Safari and Firefox) now limit our ability to show ads to users who have visited your website (commonly called retargeting)
Specifically we can only show retargeting ads to these people who have visited our website for 24 hours before the cookie gets deleted and then we can no longer show ads to them.
Why is this a problem?
Because, generally speaking a retargeting campaign is one of the highest performing and strongest campaigns we can run as marketers to drive attendees back to our site to convert.
The technical term for what is happening is called 'Intelligent Tracking Prevention' (or ITP) and it means we are now limited in how much we can track users online and across devices.
We have just created a chart that shows the impact across the users to one of the sites we work with (see below). At the moment, around 35% of visitors to sites will no longer see retargeting ads after 24 hours.
But this going to increase to about 70% when Google also implements ITP on their
So if we can no longer retarget people who have visited our website, what should you do?
We have been working on solutions to overcome this problem and we have identified four that you need to be aware of.
Solutions
- Owned data
- Start thinking about data that you own and have access to that is not relying on other companies (third parties such as Facebook and Google). Specifically, think about building out your first-party data (think databases) and treat these people well. These databases can be leveraged across multiple platforms.
- Do you have a database growth strategy? Are you actively building this? Are you paying close attention to these metrics?
- Machine learning
- Start to think more about machine learning when running your campaigns across Google and Facebook. These companies know a lot about us so setting up your campaign objectives and audiences so that we are leveraging the smarts behind these machines will start to become even more important.
- Know your avatars and pay attention to top of funnel awareness campaigns.
- Go through the exercise of really defining who is your target market and "avatar" so that you don't need to rely on third-party audiences. If you know who you are targeting then running ads to where these people are hanging out online becomes significantly easier.
- If you want the avatar worksheet that we use to go deep into this, just hit reply.
- Attribution, analytics and reporting
- Know your numbers. This update is going to have a big impact on the way we understand the value of digital. Previously we would see lots of conversions coming through social campaigns due to retargeting, now with this going away, we are going to start to see these conversions popping up in 'direct', 'organic' or 'paid search' instead of social. Social is still super important but you will start to see a drop off in conversions from this channel.
Ok.
That's a big update.
Comment below or call me on 0408 887 878 if you have any questions.
Big changes happening in the digital space, make sure you are ready and preparing now so that you can continue to make the best use of your marketing budget.
Cheers
Robin
PS. If you want the Avatar worksheet just shoot us an email and we'll send it across to you. It's super helpful to understand your ideal customer better and where they are hanging out online.