How can you do digital marketing without third-party cookies? How will it affect your marketing and marketing technology? Basis Technologies research shows that there have been warnings for years Yet, half of marketing professionals don't believe their organizations are ready for obsolescence.
Sentry.io removed all advertising and tracking cookies last July. Elaine Zhu, the company's vice president of global marketing, said even though he planned for more than a year, there were still surprises.
“We don't necessarily understand how deeply ingrained advertising cookies are in our ecosystem and all the tools we use,” she said.
Sentry provides SaaS error and performance monitoring for developers. Retiring cookies is not the only reason behind this change. Szu and her team were looking at how the company connected with customers and were concerned about relying too much on Google for acquisitions.
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“Most sane, rational marketers would say, 'Well, we should delay it.' [getting rid of cookies] “For as long as possible,” she said. “We took a slightly different approach. We've been thinking about it since 2022. It's mainly about our overall customer acquisition strategy, the different sources we look at to appeal to our audience, and It was driven by conversations around the entire customer journey.”
Cost of storing cookies
There was a lot of concern about the impact this would have on customer acquisition, but there was also a lot of concern about how customers would impact customer acquisition. did not do it Remove cookies. Sentry's customers are developers, and as Szu notes, “developers are inherently very allergic to being tracked.”
Developers are also very sensitive to anything that smacks of standard marketing. This has always been at the core of Sentry's efforts to connect with them.
The software sold by Sentry is based on open source programs and is itself open source. Developers can modify and use it as long as they agree not to compete with the company for two years after purchase. As his website for the company states, “Sentry is an open source company because the right to learn and share what you learn with others is fundamental to the product's growth and relevance.”
The open source developer community will react strongly if its values are not respected. However, if they decide that a company is authentic and aligned with those values, they will be incredibly loyal and willing to tell others.
“We've been very conscious and thoughtful about the fact that we don't push monetization or marketing onto the open source community,” Szu said. “We're really investing in developer content and technical tutorials, building a more educational approach to marketing and allowing developers to choose when they're ready to talk to us. .”
In other words, their customer base is someone who is likely to notice and respond positively to Sentry removing cookies from their site.
What could go wrong?
The Sentry team wasn't just concerned about customer acquisition without cookies. There was also the issue of implications for technology and data collection.
Matt Henderson, the company's head of global marketing, said in a blog post: My first reaction was to express concern as to why it shouldn't be done or should be postponed. ”
The first breakpoint he was concerned about was:
- Attribution model (in this case first-touch and multi-touch).
- Business Insights Tools Marketing Report.
- Google Analytics.
- All SEO reports (built on GA and GA4).
- Google Ads Smart Bidding.
- Sourcing new onboarding tools.
- Remarketing.
For Szu, this meant the team had to go back to the marketing mindset people used when search marketing was still in its infancy.
“It's like going back 10 years, when we were always moving towards a pull-type mechanism rather than a push,” she said. “We need great brand investments that are consistent and resonate. We need to be more thoughtful in the way we market and educate the world and avoid trying to force audiences into our funnels. Instead, use creative ways to get in front of your audience.”
what they didn't expect
The Sentry team had a pretty good understanding of how the loss of cookies would affect technology, but they didn't fully understand how it would affect how it works with the rest of the digital world. did not. For example, partner peer reviews were an important part of marketing. These reviews are done using cookies, which are no longer available.
“This is not something we expected, because it’s not something you wouldn’t think about,” Szu said. “You're thinking more about directly owned and operated properties, attribution tracking, and retargeting capabilities. We knew we needed to retarget our core tracking. We knew that in order to build UTM Parameters, we would have to focus on UTM Parameters and rebuild all our business intelligence. It was all expected. It was something we hadn't really thought through. are these third parties and other areas.”
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An unexpected issue with video hosting alone caused a last-minute issue that delayed the relaunch of Sentry's website by two weeks. Sentry posted the recording of the workshop on his YouTube and embedded it on his website. However, if you do this, YouTube will place a cookie on your site. Once the team figured that out, they had to upload all their videos to Vimeo and redirect all videos hosted on their website to Vimeo.
things that can break
Below is a list of other things Matt Henderson didn't realize would be a problem after deleting all the tracks on his website. “Some of these were due to extreme measures of user tracking and removing cookie banners entirely, but most were due to cookie deletion,” he wrote.
- The Google Ads GCLID is passed to your site.
- A bot blocking tool for ads that relies on both pixels and GCLIDs.
- Similarity modeling is not an option for sharing data with advertising platforms.
- Unable to use Salesforce x Google Ads integration.
- Display marketing and subscriptions from YouTube are completely lost.
- Referrer data for content analysis will be lost.
- I quadrupled my website's 404s and accidentally redirected them (oops).
The last point helped the team improve the quality of the website by identifying outdated pages that weren't updated or used properly.
By removing all cookies that require visitor consent, Sentry can also remove consent banners, a ubiquitous and often overlooked irritant.
“That in itself is kind of the initial confusion that all users are facing with all websites at this point,” Szu said. “[Visitors] It's like, “I don't want to think about this.” I was just about to look at this product. ” So we were able to reduce friction in the user's experience. These are some of our core values. ”
What do you do without targeting data?
The Sentry team knew that a lack of signal with Google would severely impact traffic. They decided to approach this as an opportunity to learn another way to find an audience.
“After deleting cookies, display and other channels were significantly hampered,” Henderson wrote. “Without the ability to use GA4 audiences or the Google Ads pixel, traditional retargeting motion quickly disappeared.”
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They decided to rely on ad engagement retargeting rather than traditional retargeting for most of their advertising channels. Of course it's not the same, but it gave them something of a funnel. So they tailored their ads to focus on the middle and bottom of the funnel to suit their existing audience.
At the same time, we realized that finding new customers through display advertising was not working. Szu and her team repurposed that budget into sponsorships and publishers they knew would appeal to their core audience. “For some businesses, you may not see impressive conversion numbers, but you now have a place to tell your story to your audience,” Henderson writes.
Strategies for different channels
Without cookies, Google search CPC increased by about 30%. To mitigate audience decline, we recommend using hashed passbacks, offline signals/APIs, and smart strategies like target CPA bidding and maximizing conversions.
- For Google Search, we've reverted to using enhanced CPC and max clicks to optimize for less important factors than when using data from cookies. We now monitor negative keywords and location data more closely and use them as proxies for bidding models to classify user intent.
- For YouTube, we used target CPV for video viewers or engagement and target CPM for awareness. Now that we can no longer use video action campaigns, we're focusing more on reach. The results were impressive. “Ultimately, his video views have increased 13 times over the period and he has more quality site visitors than ever before,” Henderson wrote. Viewership benchmarks are industry averages and exceed Google's benchmarks. In the end, this was a successful shift. Additionally, in our onboarding survey, we saw a 100% increase in people who said they heard about us from YouTube quarter-over-quarter.
- For display, we moved to viewable CPM, which cut costs by almost half and resulted in a significant month-over-month increase in impressions (+20%). However, as the bidding model changed, the number of conversions gradually decreased and fell off a cliff.
The details of Sentry's case may not apply to all organizations. How many places have a customer base that appreciates or even notices the absence of cookies? Zoo and Henderson know that. By sharing their journey, they hope people understand that going cookieless is very doable and can lead to better, more creative marketing. .
As part of the company's belief that “sharing what we learn with others is fundamental to a product's growth and relevance,” the Sentry team said: Detailed blog post about life after cookies.
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