The crumbling cookie effect, shaped by the increased sensitivity to data privacy and Google’s crackdown on third-party web cookies, is throwing the affiliate marketing world into an uncertain frenzy about how they’re going to continue to generate more leads and prospects.
On the alternative side of the scope, marketers, developers, and researchers are throwing themselves into action to grapple with how they can better prepare for a future that is looming with uncertainty.
To understand the full impact of a cookieless marketing world, we looked into a recent study conducted by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), which covers why cookies are going away, how consumers are denouncing cookies for more data privacy, and how tech is bridging that gap.
Who Should Care About Limited Data Tracking?
These limitations affect every business that relies on buying or selling leads, regardless of their vertical or industry.
For instance, the insurance industry spends an average of $7.8 billion per year on its marketing efforts to attract new leads and prospective customers. As implied, the marketplace for insurance leads is enormous.
But with a considerable industry comes a tremendous need for reliable call and web tracking insights into the lead journey. What companies like Google have done, however, is back consumers and regulatory agencies on challenging affiliate marketers and other businesses on how they can track a user’s lead journey.
So with legacy tracking methods constantly declining partnership opportunities, the need to upgrade affiliate marketing and tracking methods continues to arise.
Out With The Old Methods, In With The New Tech
The cookie tracking process revolves around clicks, impressions, and sales delivered by affiliates, publishers, and partners as the lead transfers through the sales funnel. The process usually includes the following steps:
- Third-party cookies or small data files or pixels are stored in a user’s browser while they visit a website;
- Marketers and brands that are associated with these domains use the information gathered by those pixels;
- The company builds marketing personas and targets ads based on the user’s behavior.
Even with these options, only a fraction of cookie-based targeting ends up reaching the right users, which means that a considerable amount of traffic is left untapped.
The consequences that follow are vast and depthful. Not having access to identifiable campaign success and performance measures often affects how affiliates and partners optimize their marketing campaigns to better their sales attribution, measure ROI, and increase visibility into campaign performance.
That’s when modern tech comes into play.
How Technology Is Bridging The Gap And Why You Should Upgrade Your Tracking Tech Stack
Due to legislation and consumers vying against cookie tracking, many affiliate marketers have turned to tech to support their constructive journeys toward alternative tracking options to build client retention.
Here are some methods:
Creating A First-Party Data Strategy
Planning for a first-party data strategy can include targeted content marketing and opt-in data exchange. One of the methods you can use to optimize your first-party data strategy is content to gather more leads.
To that end, well-written gated assets can go a long way when it comes to attracting a user’s attention and drawing them to contribute their contact information in exchange for valuable content. What this does is create a legal, reliable, and personalized base of first-party data on your leads.
Once you’ve identified a content strategy, look into the indicators of what metrics you need to evaluate and measure the success and effectiveness of your content marketing strategy.
Alternative Tracking Tech That Just Do It Better
The cookieless world may seem bleak at first, but it doesn’t imply that tracking is done. Marketing tech companies have researched every possible scenario to transition into a more innovative and safer way to generate leads and induce higher ROIs.
The Phonexa platform, for example, has bundled together seven marketing automation and tracking products to help users optimize and track all aspects of their marketing campaigns.
Here are some ways you can use Phonexa products to supplement full lead transparency and tracking.
Lynx
Lynx operates much like a regular third-party cookie tracking tool and provides traffic transparency by following the user journey through links in real-time on a given integrated website.
With its capabilities to measure clicks, conversions, sign-ups, and other critical details in your website, Lynx optimizes performance tracking and gives marketers complete control over lead journeys. Finally, its precise targeting optics secure the high-intent leads that come through the sales funnel by recording and storing the user data on a centralized dashboard.
LMS Sync
This lead management software builds optimized marketing strategies by analyzing the data collected by the Lynx tool. It provides lead tracking, analytics, and distribution options, which you can utilize to target a given audience or lead.
Once you have gathered enough data and insights into your target consumers and those on your website, you can use E-Delivery and Call Logic to streamline your outbound marketing efforts as you compete to gain the full attention of your target audience.
Don’t miss out on the chance to use Phonexa to power all of your affiliate marketing strategies and efforts by using one of our seven products that track your calls, leads, clicks, email, SMS, accounting, and more. Schedule a consultation to learn more about how Phonexa can help you today.
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