The holy grail of marketing and ecommerce should be to know thy customer. Better yet, know thy prospects and customers.
One average, 95% of an ecommerce websites traffic is unknown to the brand.
One of the biggest challenges marketers have faced since the dawn of digital advertising is bounce rates. Of all the people driven to a website via marketing channels, only a very small percentage of them actually convert into customers. This is the equivalent of someone walking into a physical store, poking around, and walking out. The brand was successful getting the shopper into the store/website, at a cost, but then couldn’t convert them. This loss, in turn, drives up the cost of acquiring a new customer.
Around 2009, point solution retargeting became a tactic that brands discovered as a way to follow those people around after they left the store. This was a good idea for brands but the incremental value of each redirected shopper was minimal. Companies like CRITEO and RTB House were/are the best at this tactic and used technology to provide incremental value.
But point solution retargeting lacks the relationship building of marketing and focuses on the transactional value of advertising. They are a black box of data that prevents brands from learning about their customers. They also rely on 3rd party cookies. Once plentiful and useful but now limited and dying. Point solutions can only reach about half of the users that bail on a website and that number will decline to zero in 2024. There are a few talked about solutions but no one knows for sure what their options will be.
It’s time for brands to start relying on technology that will help them build relationships with shoppers and provide them with learning to target and drive the best shoppers, cost efficiently. There is a new crop of MarTech companies popping up that offer email addresses and enhanced data on website visitors without 3rd party cookies. This is valuable information to perform marketing but brands need a deeper level of understanding about the user behaviors so audiences can be built and campaigns can be optimized. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning need to be leveraged with this data so that brands can see what the human eye can’t. It’s one thing to have the information and another thing to understand it. Look for solutions that offer the data and the analysis. They need to be able to connect into your marketing platforms to provide real value…
Cogent has spent the majority of 2023 in search of cookieless solutions and in this category, Krateo rises to the top for B2C brands. Cogent will continue to stay heavily involved in this space and bring our members and readers solutions that can drive their business forward, without 3rd party cookies. Please reach out to me (sean@becogent.co) or my partner, Tom Barbaro (tom@becogent.co) to discuss this topic or vendors.
