4 Ways Cookie Laws Impact eCommerce
By 2023, Google will stop personalizing ads through web cookies. All of this is the result of changes in the law to stop tracking of users on the Internet and the main reason for this is concerns about the use of personal data. When that happens, and it's almost certain at this point, nothing will ever be the same for digital advertising and e-commerce.
But how will this really impact the way you do business and build new customer relationships? What's the new way to drive up KPIs? Let's find out what's changing and how you can use this context to optimize the way you do business.
But how will this really impact the way you do business and build new customer relationships? What's the new way to drive up KPIs? Let's find out what's changing and how you can use this context to optimize the way you do business.
Cookies and privacy legislation impact for 2023
The largest privacy regulation in the world is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It's based on the fact that all personal data cannot be used without the user's consent and, if the person gives it, it must be carefully protected.
For this reason, major browsers such as Opera, Safari, Firefox and Brave have communicated that their use of cookies is already zero.
At this extent it’s important to know the associated laws that will affect your business, as you'll lose the history of your users' visits to other pages and will have to look for alternatives for segmenting and recognizing your website visitors.
Optimized content, keywords and targeting technologies will be strategies that can help with web tracking, because without third-party cookies the process will become more and more complex. Let’s see how.
4 ways to improve your ecommerce with the new cookie rules
These are some of the ways to continue to develop effective digital marketing strategies in a no-cookie world:
1. Google Analytics 4 & Google.Ads
The first and most useful one. It was developed primarily to replace and enhance the privacy controls of Google's previous analytics product, Universal Analytics.
In this regard, the Universal Analytics and Universal Analytics 360 features will become obsolete and will no longer process new visits as of July 1, 2023 and October 1, 2023, respectively. If your website is still collecting data with Universal Analytics at the time of obsolescence, your Universal Analytics implementation will simply stop working.
That's why you need to start converting from Universal Analytics to Google Analytics 4 and do it ASAP.
Google Ads is adopting the same data collection model, so you should only use the Global Site Tag to integrate Ads and Google Analytics at the data collection level, reduce data sprawl and improve your attribution model. The Google Tag uses first party cookies to minimize ad and browser blocking.
Use the Google Tag Manager to manage tags instead of a script on the pages because the data they can collect with its script is much less than what they can collect and manage when implementing them through GTM.
Google Analytics 4 isn't fully GDPR compliant. Despite additional privacy-friendly features, it still has an uncertain standing with European regulators. After the Privacy Shield framework expired in 2020, Google has yet to regulate EU-US data privacy.
The downside is the company doesn't adequately protect the data of users from U.S. surveillance laws and this is a direct violation of the GDPR.
2. Facebook Conversions API
The great Conversions API is designed to provide a direct link between your marketing data and the systems that help you optimize your ad targeting. The idea is to lower your cost per action and improve your results with meta-technologies.
The Facebook Conversions API system provides for a dual implementation between a client-side pixel and a data feed from your server to the Facebook server. It's designed to provide a direct and reliable connection between marketing data from your server, website platform or CRM and meta.
This marketing data helps improve personalization, optimization, and ad measurement in Meta so that ads are displayed to those most likely to be interested in them.
3. Google Consent Mode
Google Consent Mode is a new API that gives you more flexibility when using Google products in combination with other cookie consent management platforms. It encourages the protection of web applications from hackers and other malicious parties.
Continue to effectively measure conversions on your website while accurately respecting your users' consent to advertising or analytics cookies. In practice, you can continue to measure conversions without your tags violating your users' consent.
Consent mode isn't a way to violate users' cookie consent; the API respects those consents while providing alternative measurement methods.
If your user hasn't consented, the associated tags must change their behavior and send so-called pings instead of hits to report relevant events. The events that pings report are:
- Consent status: each page visited by the user sends a ping for each cookie type (this also means reporting whether a consent has been changed)
- Conversions: when a conversion occurs, a ping informs about it
- Google Analytics: every page where Google Analytics has been implemented sends pings so that visits and events are recorded
In case of rejection of your cookies you'll not be able to obtain detailed information about the visitors that will allow you to target them again. It also won't be possible to send personalized advertisements to these users, so all the information collected through pings will allow you to measure the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns or analyze your web traffic.
4. Cloud Delivery
This data can be used by a CRM or ERP system, an email marketing automation platform, an analytics tool, or a content personalization tool on your web/app.
If you use consolidated server-side tagging instead of a web tag/pixel, where a central system collects all your users' events and data, this system will forward the data to external providers (Facebook, Google Ads, Google Analytics, email marketing, etc.).
With server-side data management, also known as cloud delivery, a pixel or tag on the server sends data to another web service and then forwards that data to the target system. In this way:
- This action simplifies the DataAnalytics process of collection and submission by sending a data stream to a cloud-based repository and then forwarding the data to your providers.
- Sending data between servers reduces errors caused by browser load, connection issues, ad blockers, and the inability to enable third-party cookies.
- Consolidates metrics and reduces or eliminates data scatter between media or analytics platforms. Improves search engine optimization by reducing reliance on client-side JavaScript and accelerating website and web/app load times.
To do this, it's important that you continue to respect users' explicit consent to be measured or not, and share their data and activities with your company, your website APP and your digital partners.
This technology doesn't exempt you from compliance with the law. If your company/digital project is affected by a data protection regulation and you don't prepare it properly, keep in mind that the consequences are fines in the millions.
Data is sent from server to server via API over HTTPS or server-side tracking protocols, an application-level protocol used for data transfer. This is done via an API key, which is a cryptographic key for the API. It must be kept confidential and mustn't be shared with third parties.
To do this, it's important that you continue to respect users' explicit consent to be measured or not, and share their data and activities with your company, your website APP and your digital partners.
This technology doesn't exempt you from compliance with the law. If your company/digital project is affected by a data protection regulation and you don't prepare it properly, keep in mind that the consequences are fines in the millions.
Data is sent from server to server via API over HTTPS or server-side tracking protocols, an application-level protocol used for data transfer. This is done via an API key, which is a cryptographic key for the API. It must be kept confidential and mustn't be shared with third parties.
Use these ways to improve your ecommerce despite cookie changes
There's a transition to a new way of measuring web traffic, analyzing data and its effectiveness
If you've a thriving e-commerce brand and want to dedicate yourself to managing your business well, adapt to this new activity tracking model and keep getting valuable information about your campaigns. Be sure to:
⇢ Transfer all your promotional activities to a single online platform. It can be an ideal alternative to get a compact database
⇢ Use Google. It’s present in a large part of the users' web and it can store a large number of its own cookies, allowing advertisers working with Google Ads to get reliable references to decide where to position themselves.
⇢ Note that advertisers won't have direct access to this information as before, so the privacy of users will be preserved.
⇢ Use Google. It’s present in a large part of the users' web and it can store a large number of its own cookies, allowing advertisers working with Google Ads to get reliable references to decide where to position themselves.
⇢ Note that advertisers won't have direct access to this information as before, so the privacy of users will be preserved.
If you want to keep working your ecommerce with data accuracy, user privacy and website performance, then it is essential to start implementing the tools we describe. Some browsers already require it, but while Google is still getting rid of the cookie world, it is important that you familiarize your processes and start taking advantage of it.
Not only does it help you understand user behavior, but it also affects the results of your campaigns. Don't waste time and be part of the new cookie-less revolution.
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Guillermo Navas for ROI4CIO
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