What Steps Do You Need To Take To Prepare For Cookieless PPC?

With the first major migration to FloC beginning in Q2 of 2021, what happens to PPC campaigns?

March 2021 spelt the end of putting off evolving workflows and advertising till tomorrow when Google confirmed the first major migration to FloC will begin in Q2 of 2021, getting one step closer to their promise of a cookieless experience by 2022.

Which Strategies Thrive & Which Are Retiring?

One of the best aspects of PPC is that there’s always something new to learn and try. The strategies that worked 3 years ago retired to the strategies that worked 1 year ago.

These are the 2 main strategies impacted by the change to cookieless:

• Remarketing
• Personalized creative

 

Remarketing Will Thrive in a New Way

Most of us think about remarketing from a cookie-based perspective. User lands on a site, user gets tagged, user receives an onslaught of ads.

Now that we’re evolving past cookies, first-party data (like emails collected from promos and form-fills) will ensure that remarketing is seen as valuable instead of annoying.

Brands earn the right for an extended conversation by creating great user experiences prospects want to opt into.

When we target users who’ve agreed to a conversation (as opposed to stalking folks who may or may not be interested in our goods and services), we see better cost per acquisition.

 

Personalized Creative Thrives as We Focus on More Than Just Ads

Message mapping is a critical strategy for digital marketing. If we’re going to invest our marketing dollars in traffic, we better make sure the content is best suited to our target market.

The good news is that we still get to customize creative by audience and UTM parameter!

First-party data audiences can still be called on to adapt text ads.

UTM parameters remain one of the most effective tools for attribution and customizing landing page experience, yet they are often neglected.

As we venture into the new marketing world of earned trust and high-quality experiences, leveraging UTM parameters to customize landing pages is even more important.

 

Critical Actions to Take

First and foremost, digital marketers need to make sure any and all lead capture initiatives are compliant with Google’s first-party data standards. This means including language on how data will be used without getting in the way of user experience.

Beyond that, building a lead capture mechanism will be more important than ever. We see improved performance on campaigns that have customer list targeting. Website visitor data is going to be harder to capture, and relying on it may leave campaigns blindsided.