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Google recently announced that in early 2024 it plans to migrate 1% of Chrome users to Privacy Sandbox and disable third-party cookies for them by default. This is part of an effort to assess Privacy Sandbox’s real-world readiness for the bigger changes that will come later in the year — namely, launching Chrome 115, which will deprecate all third-party cookies.
Google’s announcement comes as no surprise — in recent months, we’ve seen a flurry of stories about new data privacy restrictions, and Google is merely staying ahead of the curve. In the UK, regulators took a comprehensive approach to data privacy protections with the introduction of GDPR in 2018. While some businesses initially found GDPR challenging to adapt to, most companies have since established compliant data management practices. More recently, the UK government introduced the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill. The goal of the bill is to update the legal framework to account for new technologies like AI and machine learning, in order to balance innovation with privacy. Experts see the bill as a refinement rather than reversal of the UK's strong data protections.
These recent developments in the data privacy landscape leave UK marketers in a precarious position — for many years, third-party cookies were the foundation for data collection. They allowed teams to capture granular insights about their target audience and build sophisticated remarketing campaigns. With less third-party data available to marketers, teams are taking a new approach and tapping into first-party data sources.
In this post, we’ll cover how UK marketing teams can use first-party data to fill the gap created by third-party cookie deprecation. We’ll also go in depth about a rich first-party data source that companies too often leave untapped — phone conversations.
Third-party data is collected by external sources that are not directly connected to your organization. It is gathered from various platforms, publishers, data providers, or aggregators who collect data from multiple sources. Third-party data can include demographic information, browsing behavior, purchase history, or interests. Marketers use third-party data to enhance their understanding of consumers beyond their existing customer base.
First-party data, on the other hand, is collected from your own customers or website visitors. It includes data obtained through interactions with your brand, such as website visits, purchases, email subscriptions, phone conversations, and social media engagement. This type of data is very reliable and accurate since it comes directly from your audience, and you have complete control over how it is collected and stored. In addition, it gives you a competitive advantage since your company maintains exclusive ownership of it.
Learn more about the differences between first, second, and third-party data in this post.
According to Google, while 90% of marketers say that first-party data is important to their digital marketing, just 1 in 3 claim to be using it effectively. With third-party data on the outs, let’s dive into some tips for using first-party data to improve marketing performance.
The first step to tapping into your first-party data is simply understanding what data sources are available to you. Companies often underestimate the wealth of information they have at their fingertips. Conducting a comprehensive audit can unveil a treasure trove of valuable insights that you can use to improve ad targeting and performance. Here are some of the first-party data sources UK marketers are tapping into to fill their third-party data gap:
By delving into first-party data sources, you can gain a deeper understanding of your customer base, enabling you to segment audiences more precisely. This segmentation allows for targeted messaging, personalized recommendations, and customized experiences, fostering stronger connections with customers. Additionally, auditing aids in identifying gaps in data collection, allowing you to make adjustments to ensure you have the data you need.
With the deprecation of third-party cookies, UK marketers can no longer track visitors across the web. The best way to get behavioral insights in this new landscape is to set up robust website tagging on your own website. Website tags are simple snippets of javascript code that you can add to your site to collect first-party data about customers, such as whether they click an ad, view a video, download content, browse products, or add an item to their cart. This gives you valuable insights into the customer journey and allows you to tailor your future interactions with them accordingly. Learn more about site tagging in this post from AdExchanger.
But, as you know, today’s buyer journey is omnichannel — your customers bounce between several touchpoints and devices as they complete purchases. Tracking their online behavior is only one piece of the puzzle — to get a complete picture of customer behavior, you need to understand their offline interactions as well. To bridge the gap between online and offline behavior, marketers use Invoca website tags. Invoca’s tags are simple javascript snippets that are easy to deploy. Once in place, they can track the complete customer journey, including the search terms the customer used to find your website, the product pages they viewed, key phrases they said when they called you, and whether they ultimately purchased over the phone.
Don’t worry: Invoca’s tag complies with the cookie opt-out policies on your website!
Phone conversations are one of the richest forms of first-party data available to your business. In these interactions, your customers are literally telling you what they need and how to make them happy. They're also revealing their sentiments about your products and giving out information far beyond what you would receive from an online form.
Though phone conversations are brimming with valuable insights, they’ve been traditionally underutilized by marketers. That’s because, in the past, it was difficult to get these insights at scale. Invoca’s AI solves this problem, allowing you to easily capture the insights you need to feed your UK marketing strategy.
Training an AI model may sound like a daunting task to take on, but not with Invoca! Our Signal AI Studio offers a no-code UI that speeds you through the process of training custom AI models. You simply tell it the insight you want to measure, and Signal AI Studio shows you transcribed examples from your calls that either fit or don’t fit that insight. It learns with every response, creating a new AI model in no time. Custom AI models from Signal AI Studio can accurately detect virtually any insight or topic from conversations, including caller intent, caller interest, conversation outcome, competitor insights, and much more.
If you don't know what to look for, you can use Invoca's Topic Explorer tool. This tool allows you to visualize the themes and related topics being discussed across thousands of your calls at once to surface unexpected insights. You can specify the topics or categories you want Topic Explorer to visualize, view GPT-powered descriptions of topic summaries, and review transcribed examples from actual calls. Topic Explorer is a unique and powerful way to surface new and actionable insights you weren’t using Signal AI Studio to actively analyze.
Unlike some AI tools, Invoca doesn’t send customer data out to another third-party service for processing. It maintains all customer data in-house, ensuring its protection and integrity.
When you tap into your first-party data, the last thing you need is to add more manual processes to your workflows. Some tools don’t integrate with your CRM or CDP and require you to scrape data from spreadsheets instead. This not only creates a headache for your marketing team, but it can cause lag time between when you’ve collected the first-party data and when you can activate it to drive personalization. As a result, you may be incorrectly targeting customers or serving them irrelevant ads.
Invoca solves this issue by seamlessly streaming your conversation intelligence data into the tools you use every day, including your CRM and CDP. Invoca has easy-to-deploy no-code integrations that can be set up in minutes with no developer work required. In addition, the integrations stream conversation intelligence data to your martech platforms in near-real time, so you can move quickly to retarget your customers and personalize their experiences.
Check out Invoca’s integration library here.
The best way to fuel personalization is with data — when you capture deep first-party data about your customers, you can better understand their wants, needs, and preferences. Insights from phone conversations are an especially powerful tool to fuel any personalization strategy.
With conversation intelligence, you can capture first-party data from phone conversations at scale. This allows you to create a cohesive experience across every channel the customer engages with. For example, you can pinpoint leads who called, showed buying intent, and didn’t convert so you can add them to your nurture stream or retarget them with tempting promotions. You can also suppress retargeting to customers who already converted on the phone so you can use that budget to drive new customer acquisition.
When you personalize every touchpoint in the buyer journey, you drive more conversions and increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. You also reduce wasted ad spend with smarter suppression tactics.
Invoca is fully committed to complying with applicable state and international data privacy laws, ensuring that customer information remains protected and secure. We’re ISO 27001 and GDPR compliant. In addition, our solution automatically redacts sensitive personal data from your customers’ call transcripts. It’s why leading international brands like Rentokil, Rogers Communications, and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts trust us as their conversation intelligence partner.
Learn more about Invoca’s commitment to security and data privacy here.
Want to learn more about how you can replace first-party data with rich third-party data from phone conversations? Check out these resources:
