Despite their bad reputation, cookies are how the online world can get to know you. What happens to online experiences when that understanding goes away?
By Ethan Martin, Strategy Director, Goodness
When Google recently announced that they wouldn’t be deprecating 3rd-party cookies afterall, it marked a sudden and unceremonious end to the latest effort to curb online tracking. But even before this, people’s hatred for cookies has been simmering for a long time. They’ve been called “stalking” tools for advertisers. Others have claimed that cookies could be used to make inferences about your health. Companies have been fined and laws written. But even with privacy concerns, it turns out that brands, advertisers, service providers and everyday internet users can’t live without them. Even as trends shift from 3rd-party to 1st-party data, it’s almost impossible to escape cookies completely.
The reality is that most of the content we interact with online is tailored to various degrees, and that’s powered by cookies. 3rd-party cookies are primarily used for tracking users across different sites, and enable brands to serve ads that are more relevant to individuals as they browse the web. That pair of shoes you looked at and are now popping up in ads on every site you visit? That’s 3rd-party cookies at work. 1st-party cookies tend to be less annoying, and actually useful for users, allowing specific websites to save things like shopping cart contents, language preferences, and other past interactions.
The shared agreement that many of us make for the convenience and personalization they provide is to turn a blind eye to the implications of cookie-based tracking. For example, studies suggest that young people simply don’t care that they are being tracked. The rest simply turn off cookies or website tracking to protect their privacy. But when they do, they enter a strange digital landscape stripped of all of the basic things we’ve come to expect from the online experience. It’s like the online world no longer understands us – who we are, what we need and how best to serve us. In pursuit of absolute privacy and invisibility to brands, is this really the result we’re fighting for? Or are we just looking for more consideration and a better return on investment for the data we volunteer?
Going cookieless
Unless you’re old enough, it’s probably hard to imagine a world without cookies. Back then, every time you went to a site without logging in, it was like you were going there for the first time. Also, brands were taking wild (and often wrong) guesses as to what people wanted to see. Everything felt more experimental, but also clunkier and harder to navigate. And yes, today’s cookies do play a part in creating a curated bubble that we navigate within. Maybe our collective aperture would open up without them. But there would also be a lot of friction in our everyday micro-interactions – ones that we currently take for granted.
Despite the benefit, for the broader public there’s still a general disdain for being tracked. We value our independence and the idea that there’s an invisible entity tracking your every move is unsettling at an instinctual level. Plus, there have been legitimate abuses – instances where cookies have been used to covertly harvest and store tons of user data.
Cookies have also been prone to excess and inefficiency. I’ve audited countless sites with tons of tracking scripts – most of which no one knew when they were installed and why. In these cases, brands were paying for a service that they weren’t using, while also hurting their own site performance with bloated code.
Still, cookies – and the level of personalization they enable – remain essential. Particularly when it comes to useful 1st-party data, which gives brands a much better understanding of site users and the experiences, services, discounts, and products they need instead of just worthless spam and distractions. Of course, skepticism of cookies is understandable and a healthy part of keeping cookie-users honest. But skeptics also tend to underestimate how unwieldy and horrible a cookieless internet would be. Brands would suffer too as the cost of customer acquisition would swell incredibly.
So, while 3rd-party cookies may eventually fall out of favor, it’s important that at minimum 1st-party cookies survive – at least until a suitable replacement is developed. Ensuring this, however, means that brands must improve their reputation by making sure the data is used in undeniably valuable ways.
An equitable trade
Fixing the anxiety around cookies means resisting the urge to use data from 1st-party cookies in obnoxious ways. Most people are aware that their online behavior is being tracked. It’s when attempts at personalization miss the mark – like recommending a product that someone has already purchased – that people get irritated. That’s why a winning strategy is about delivering a better data-driven experience for users. Here’s where to start:
Always give back: Brands should think about digital experience in the same way they think about customer experience at a flagship brick and mortar store. It’s a chance to build trust, loyalty, and long-term relationships, which are essential for sustainable growth. When customers feel valued, they’re more likely to return, recommend the brand, and engage with it positively in the future.
Help their bottom line, not yours: Cookies can be used to understand people in ways that can literally put money back in the consumers’ pockets. For example, if shoppers schedule an automated delivery every 3 weeks, but the data shows that’s probably too often, brands should use that information to help shoppers sign up for the subscription that makes sense for them. Data should be used as a way to answer the question “how do we help people order the right products?” versus just “how do we sell the most products?”
Plan ahead: Brands need to have a vision for what they’re going to do with data from cookies rather than just collecting it because they can and coming up with a purpose after the fact. That could be at the macro level – tracking what types of page content people love to make other pages similarly useful. Or it could be at the individual level – surfacing “Recently Viewed” products to users who are returning to a site, so they don’t have to start their search from scratch every time. Framing a data strategy around “if we knew ___ about our consumers, we could make their lives easier” will allow brands to create experiences that truly deliver value.
Shopping, browsing, learning and playing online doesn’t have to feel like you’re being taken advantage of by cookies. Instead, every experience should feel like it knows you and understands how best to serve you. The more that brands can deliver on that promise, the less they’ll have to worry the next time tracking anxieties reemerge.
About the Author
Ethan Martin is the Strategy Director of Goodness, a digital experience partner for best-in-class brands
