Building for a Cookieless Future

What can you control in a cookieless site future

The good news is a cookieless future does not equate to a world of no detailed measurement of visitors.

Defining third-party tracking and determining if it matters to your site

To start, if you rarely use Google Analytics, or if you’ve never used Google Tag Manager, or if you’ve never run digital media based on lookalikes, you can probably skip the rest of this page. A cookieless future would equate to your current reality.

If you have used platforms that allow you to hit lookalikes or things based on certain behaviors, it’s going to be critical to understand. Also of note, these are just a few nuggets. This is not a comprehensive, all-in-one guide and will be updated as we understand more of the intricacies of this transition.

Your new playbook has to begin with on-site analytics

Understanding what your users are doing on your site is where it all has to start.

Create User Segments

Getting past top-level analytics is the first step. While pageviews and channel sourcing are important aspects to understand, creating custom segments is the new blockbuster way to turn your site into a digital marketing version of Moneyball.

Do you have a key page that users visit in order to convert? Usually this is a form, or a product page, or some combination of both. Once you’ve defined which action you want the user to take, create a custom segment of those who progress to that page. This gives you intel into what that specific audience looks at, giving you a content map to work from.

Understand the Monetary Value of Page Visits

For sites with eCommerce or donation transactions tied to them, it’s easy to come up with an equation to work from. I break down websites into three core numbers for value:

General Visitor Value – This is the total revenue driven from the site divided by the number of site visitors
Progression Value – This is the total revenue from the site divided by the number of progressions to your forms, product pages, etc
Conversion Value – This is the total revenue divided by number of conversions you had on the site, usually called average transaction value

Once you have these values in place, you can explore by channel to see which channel is bringing in the highest values for each of these.

This then gives you your roadmap for optimization and capitalization of each appropriate channel.

Giving assurance of user privacy

While you can track your users within your own site, it is of utmost importance to convey your respect for their data privacy. Below are some key steps to consider communicating to your website visitors.

Cookie policies—if you haven’t seen one of these on at least a dozen sites you’ve visited, I need to have coffee with you because you’d be a digital unicorn
Sharing of data—providing confirmation of not sharing data with others who will spam their inboxes, etc is important, as it gives the user assurance that they can share their information with you
Dynamic experience—If you have dynamic site content that populates based on user behaviors, letting the user know this is important so that they understand it is for a better, more custom experience

These are only a few of the techniques to deploy. For an exhaustive list, I always recommend talking to your partner agency or your digital marketing expert inside your organization.