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Prepare For The Upcoming Cookieless World Using Cross Filter

Cross Filter in a Cookieless World | An Empty Plate and Glass

Uncovering Highly Targeted Visitors by Using Cross Filter for Keywords with Audience

There is a lot of talk going around over the past year or two now, about a “cookieless world”, where searchers and suffers identities are safe from the prying eyes of third-party applications and companies. It was just a thought about five to ten years ago that most had no idea of how it would ever come about, but with the addition of Audiences into the world of paid online marking that thought is now coming to fruition. Your browsers are already, if not “have” already, started to make the necessary changes to help keep your privacy safe by killing the use of all third-party cookies within their browsers.

Safari and Firefox have already put this into place, by making it a default setting to block all third-party cookies. Internet Explorer has done something similar by creating a list of third-party cookies that they will not allow to track your browsing tendencies by default. Then lastly, Google Chrome has come out to say that they will be shutting off support for third-party cookies by the year 2022. However, there are already reports coming out now in 2020 that Google will be expediting this move by January 2021.

Preparing Yourself For The Upcoming Cookieless World | Google Chrome Logo on a SmartphoneKnowing that Google Chrome is by far the most popular browser used currently, holding an estimated 62.8% estimated global market share, we have little time left to adapt to the coming world where cookies will be a thing of the past. Of course, first-party cookies will still be allowed, but that information will not, and cannot, be shared regarding having the ability to identify a single user’s identity to track them. Rather, these first-party cookies are combined to form, what is referred to as, “Audiences”. These Audiences are groups of people that have their search tendencies broken down into identifiable “Topics”, “Markets” or “Affinity Audiences”.

By using a cross filter upon these predefined relevant Audiences with your relevant Keywords, you can find yourself cheaper clicks to highly targeted people that are already looking at websites containing information about your relevant product or service. This leads to greater CTR (Click Through Rates), Conversions, Conversion Rates, and decreased CPA (Cost Per Acquisitions).

So whereas the online digital marketing industry was once befuddled by the idea of being able to target people without the use of third-party cookies, we are watching it grow larger in the window as it prepares itself to be sitting on our doorstep in just a short amount of time. Now is the time to prepare and become familiar with how we are going to deal with living in a “cookieless” world very soon, and I will help today by explaining how you can use audiences to cross filter your keywords to get you those results.

Different Types of Cookies

Before I go any further, let me quickly explain the difference between First-party cookies and Third-party cookies for those of you that may not yet be familiar with the terms.

  • First-party cookies: Simply put, first-party cookies are cookies that are stored by the domain itself that you are visiting. These types of cookies will allow the site owners to collect your personal information regarding your analytical data and remember your specific settings so that they may execute other helpful functions that will help the site owner furnish a much better user experience as you continue to use their site.
  • Third-party cookies: These cookies are created by someone other than the site that you are currently visiting. They are owned by an entity other than the owner of the site you are on… ergo the name “Third-party cookies.”

…the only real difference between the two types of cookies are the way that they are both created and used by the website(s) in question.

Pay Per Click Marketing Strategies | Man Typing PPC on ComputerWith more and more companies using platforms for PPC marketing than any other time previously, it makes it much more difficult for smaller companies with smaller advertising budgets to compete with the larger companies out there. This, in turn, makes it increasingly difficult to achieve high-quality results, namely leads and sales. With the number of advertisers increasing over the years we consequentially are seeing a continued growth in CPCs year over year effectively eating through the budgets of these smaller companies making it imperative for them to find a better, more efficient, way to target their specific market while staying within their current advertising budgets.

[bctt tweet=”Now is the time to prepare and become familiar with how we are going to deal with living in a “cookieless” world very soon…” username=”ThatCompanycom”]

Different Types of Audiences

There are different types of Audiences that you can choose from, and different ones coming from different platforms. For instance, Google Ads will have different Audiences than what you might be able to choose from if you were using Facebook Ads. So, let’s take a moment to better understand the different Audiences that are available to us all.

  • Remarketing Lists – list of members that meet specific criteria based on their traffic tendencies across an owner’s website. This data can be visitors of a specific page, people that have visited a specified group of webpages across a website, people that visited a confirmation page after completing a sale or filling out an RFI (Request For Information) form, people that abandoned a sale while on the website or any other combination of criteria you can think of dealing with a specific website.
  • In-Market Audiences – people comparing, shopping, or researching specific goods and/or services across the web. For example, if you are looking for a new car and visit several car dealership websites you can be put into an “In-Market Audience” for people looking to make a new car purchase.
  • Affinity Audiences – people that meet certain criteria labeling them as people of a certain “lifestyle” or “habit”.
  • Custom Intent & Custom Affinity – usually based on keywords, this Audience is built on your users’ intent, or perceived user intent. Some of this data may be accrued from your recent searches or perceived intent of a specific visited webpage (based on keywords within that page).
  • Customer Lists – These are a list of phone numbers, addresses, or most often email addresses that have been gathered from your CRM (Customer Relationship Management (tool)). Some CRMs that you may recognize are Marketo, Zoho, Salesforce, or HubSpot. This information is used to identify specific people that have existing accounts with whatever platform you are using for your advertising purposes. So, if you are using Google Ads, Google is looking to make the email address you provided with an email address that they currently have associated with a Gmail account. That email address can either be the primary Gmail address or even a recovery email address from your company or another personal email that you may have.
  • Similar Audiences – These Audiences are based on other qualified Remarketing Audiences. These Audiences are formed by users that meet criteria shared with users from your already existing Remarketing audience. The difference is that these “Similar” users have yet to frequent your website, but we know that they have similar tendencies to those that have already visited your website making them a prime target for you and your products or services. Use this Audience with extreme care as they are, what I call, a “Shot In The Twilight Audience”.
  • Life Events – this Audience is like the “Detailed Demographics” Audience except for the fact that they are looking for more recent “Life Events”. For instance, if you just got engaged, or you were just recently married, or that you may have just purchased a new home.
  • Detailed Demographics – This is an Audience that concentrates on a user’s “traits”. “Traits” can mean that you are “married”, a “homeowner”, a “college student”, or many other things that you might identify as a “trait”.

Each one of the above Audiences carries a different purpose regarding your online advertising strategy. Most of them can be used with both Search and Display Campaign alike, but some of them can only be used with one or the other. No matter which type of Campaign you are using though, they each can help give you a better understanding as to who is visiting your website, which Audiences have a higher tendency to convert as well as which ones tend to convert at a higher percentage.

Cross Filter the Keywords with Audiences

However, this alone will not help you find those cheaper clicks that we started talking about at the start of this article. You’ll have to use them in tandem with your keywords. Apply these Audiences to your Campaigns to make sure that you are only showing your ads to people that exhibit user intent towards your products or services, and soon you will begin to see the benefits that they offer. Lastly, to take it to another level, take a closer look into using some of the “In-Market” or “Custom Intent” Audiences as an exclusion to your Campaigns negating users that you can see have no conversion value.

Cross Filtering Your Keywords With Audiences | Clip Art of Targeted CartoonIf you want to get down to the nitty-gritty you or your PPC management team can even build Audiences in Google Analytics that import into your Google Ads Account that you can target as, what I refer to as, “Window Shoppers”. These are the people that click on your ad 5 times or more in a small date range that show no intent on using your services or purchasing your products but continue to eat away at your precious advertising budget. By building an Audience of these specific people you can stop showing your ads to them after they have visited your site X number of times by adding this Audience as an “Exclusion Audience” at the Campaign Level.

So, there you have it, folks. Use these strategies now and prepare yourself for the coming changes that await us all. The sooner you become familiar with using these strategies, the sooner you will be ahead of the curve when the rest of your industry decides to start researching and implementing them. Start now and beat the competition to the punch!

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