Unlocking the Power of First-Party Data: Your Key to Privacy & Personalization

Cookie Pop-ups and Data Grabs: The New Website Greeters

While waiting for a table at a restaurant, I walked into a nearby store I hadn’t been to. Upon entering, a greeter to the right said hello and welcomed me to the shop. Within seconds (almost like a Haunted House jump scare), another greeter on the left exclaimed, “HOLIDAY CARDS ARE 50% OFF,” and mentioned two other sales they were having. It was abrupt…and I nearly just cried and left. 

To some degree, alternately, that is the modern website experience. Each new website has a Cookie consent pop-up and, generally, a data capture pop-up on the first or second page saying, “GIVE US YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS & PHONE NUMBER.” It can feel like entering a new store and getting a loud, obnoxious one-two punch from the greeters.

With consent banner pop-ups, each new website visit feels like a quick computation about the website and company. Does it look trustworthy, and would I want to meet with this site again? Do I want to give them my info? All these quick calculations impact an analyst’s ability to measure and a marketer’s ability to hold media dollars accountable. That is a big risk with so much at stake.

Research from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that companies effectively linking their first-party data sources can generate double the revenue from a single ad, communication, or outreach and improve cost efficiency by 1.5 times. To achieve this, it’s not just about collecting first-party data; it’s about activating it.

The good news is that those sky-high View-Through conversion numbers were never truly reliable; View-Through Display and View-Through Social conversions have always been questionable metrics. They rarely translate into real business results, and their inflated numbers can distort the bigger picture. However, looking into 1P data and aligning performance with your business growth help can assist in this distortion.

So, many keep barking for us to grow our first-party data and CDP! CDP! There are a few areas you can focus on to help grow your business.

• Metrics that matter: Metrics that do not somehow in some way correlate to business outcomes will give you very little insight into whether or not your marketing has been effective. Ensure that when platform KPIs grow, you see corresponding business growth. And optimize the hell outta that. 
• Ready your single source of truth: Google Analytics should still be your single source of de-duped, 1P conversion and click-through data. While channel performance may not look as good as platform, set benchmarks and create goals to beat them. Also, Advanced Consent v2 will help fill in the gaps of unobserved traffic with modeled data.
• Invest in a ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) tool: Put money and resources into ensuring you have an automated, durable, and accurate media and business data pipeline. Upon capturing 1P, build out the mechanism to share that data with your media partners and platforms safely and securely.
• Fill the conversion gaps with 1P data: Why am I collecting all this 1P data? To get more 1P data? In a way, yes. Depending on your business model, you could be trying to increase loyalty and repeat…or you could be using 1P data to find a similar audience and generate a new sale (hence increasing your 1P dataset).
• Model-based assessment: While there are effective deterministic measurement options in the Linear, CTV, and Video solace, using modeled attribution for upper-funnel tactics is also effective. However, that is another article for another time.

With the above in place, you should be in a good position to make media decisions. Using your ETL, find safe ways to connect to your media platforms. For example, using BigQuery, you can create a direct connection to Google Ads for Offline Conversion import. The additional signal will ensure AI and automated optimizations work harder to find your business’ next best prospect.

The real game-changer is using your first-party data to fuel AI and machine learning. Think of your first-party data as a constantly evolving map of your ideal customer – the more data you connect to your marketing platforms, the more detailed and accurate that map becomes, ensuring your AI model is always up-to-date with your current customer base. AI acts as your navigator, analyzing this rich data to model your ideal audience and guide you toward the most promising marketing routes, helping you avoid wasted time and resources. This creates a powerful cycle: more data leads to better AI, which leads to more effective, result-driven optimizations that have the greatest impact on your business.

First-Party Myths Somewhat Demystified

There’s a lot of buzz around first-party data. I touched on a few of these, but below are some common misconceptions. Let’s debunk some common myths:

• Myth 1: Tracking is doomed. I mean, it could be. Every second, people make split decisions on being tracked. The good news is that if people are doing the ‘quick calc’ like I am to accept cookies, it’s based on me valuing the website and trusting the business. So when that person is tracked and a purchase is made/PII transferred, it is potent fodder for look-alikes to find other similar prospects. And luckily, there is a lot of money to be lost or gained, so companies have smarter people than me trying to prove the value of media.
• Myth 2: You need a CDP to leverage first-party data. While a Customer Data Platform (CDP) can be a valuable tool for managing and unifying your data, it’s not a prerequisite for activation. Start by focusing on tactical wins within each channel.
• Myth 3: Hoard your 1P data like Smaug and his gold. Unfortunately, the shtick with 1P data is to share it securely.  You may be the type of business or marketplace that can monetize it. However, if you are a typical e-commerce/online business, connecting 1P data to media platforms can ramp up your marketing efforts. Your likelihood of a repeat customer also dictates how best to leverage 1P data.

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Case Study

While we had a whole case study written out, we ended up cutting it.  The gist was that we implemented CAPI and were able to track more Meta leads and saw an improvement in overall website leads. Hopefully, this isn’t too much of a surprise. It’s worth testing if you haven’t.

For those unfamiliar with Meta’s CAPI or other enhanced measurement, you are securely sending a media platform, Meta, a list of emails of people who converted. And they are ultimately saying, “yes, we showed this person an ad.” And then it gets attributed. I understand how this can seem concerning to some.

Thanks for your time. Hopefully, you got something out of this. Take care.

Blog Collaborators: Brett Hughes