Here’s an instance of cookie based advertising to gain from your target audience. Suppose a restaurant has an excellent a-la carte menu.
What if when the diners come to the restaurant, the waiter recognizes them and remembers the choice of dishes they order usually?
Wouldn’t it be really overwhelming? With millions of active users on the internet and pressure on online brands to meet customers everywhere, the market looked very bright for such a process.
And this took over to the era of cookie based advertising.
Hop in to know more about it.
The Rise of Cookie Based Advertising
Now imagine a system is recording all your choices, every shopping pattern, and every search on the internet.
It follows you throughout your buying journey, anticipates your needs, and foresees what your next move is going to be so that it can recommend appropriate choices through advertisements.
Isn’t it an excellent idea to reach out to more customers out there?
But how did it do so?
With the help of cookie based advertising.
What Are Cookies?
These are simple text files which store a user activity on the internet. Cookies aim at making browsing practical and configuring information automatically.
Beyond this, cookies as their main function, save analytical information of a user browsing history.
Cookies are small files that are present in our computers; it stores visitors browsing history. They are an essential part of the internet, and without them, websites would be less interactive.
These cookies help in distinguishing a visitor from another; otherwise, visitors would be getting non-contextual advertisement. Information of these visitors is accessible to servers, for making it convenient for brands to reach their customers.
This is how cookie based advertising and targeting became the predominant method of tracking consumers across the web.
How Do Cookies Work?
Cookies are the small data packets that Web pages load on to browsers for many reasons. Each time a user returns to the same URL, the computer sends back this tiny information package to the server.
Cookie based advertising detects that a user has returned to the page. These are virtual spies that collect user Internet habits like frequently visited pages, most browsed topics, etc.
After that, this can be used for remarketing campaigns. This acts as a great help in knowing and studying online consumer behavior and significantly drives powerful marketing and sales initiatives.
Cookie Based Advertising: Categories of Online Cookies
Session cookies stay on a browser and retain users information until it is closed. As soon as the user opens a new browser, the same user is treated as a new visitor, and he needs to input login credentials again.
Persistent cookies have a designated lifespan and remain in a browser until the period elapses or the cookie is manually deleted. Websites using persistent cookies remember users even after they close a browser.
Secure cookies are used by online transaction websites where users fill in their personal information in the form of card details or passwords.
Now as you understand about cookies, let’s move further to acknowledge the evolution of cookies in retargeting.
How did cookie-based retargeting come into the picture?
In early times, brands were spending an enormous amount of money acquiring users; however, the point was to engage and retain them.
Although retention is a tough nut to crack, retargeting the users will build visibility for the brands and also bring happy and loyal customers.
Hence, marketers started to orchestrate this cookie-based retargeting technique, also known as behavioural marketing, to stand out in this fast-paced scenario.
Applications of cookie-based retargeting campaigns can be many, brands can update interested customers about slashed prices, for upselling again based on their order history, etc.
Types of Cookie Based Advertising or Retargeting Formats
Brands have the liberty to choose the motives of their retargeting campaigns, whether it would be for creating awareness or for converting leads.
However, there are various formats for retargeting.
Site tracking technique
The process is very simple. Let’s say in an omnichannel ecosystem, a user is visiting an e-commerce website, but leaves without purchasing. This information is stored in a cookie so that the system could further recognize that this user previous visits.
Whichever site the user visits, cookie based ads would be shown to them of that product in the hope of pulling them back to their website. They can click on those retargeting ads to directly return to the parent website and complete the transaction.
Display ad through email retargeting
When a user opens a marketing email of any online website, this information is stored in a cookie. This cookie then triggers display cookie based ads on third party sites.
However, display ad-based email retargeting only works when the email is opened using a browser-based email service. Cookie-based retargeting proved to be useful as it focuses on advertising spend.
Cookie based ads are triggered to only those people who are already familiar with the brand and show interest. Marketers are witnessing an increase in conversions and revenue altogether, adopting cookie-based retargeting.
But tracking cookie ids is the most critical aspect. It doesn’t just help marketers to achieve success, but also helps them to measure and multiply it. It allows the brand to understand how users engage with their website.
Also about the items they’ve added to their shopping cart, how long they lingered on certain product pages. Google AdWords and Google Analytics, follow the principle of behavioural tracking, offering distinct tracking features for better results.
Cookie Based Advertising: A Conclusion
The buzzword cookie based advertising has garnered a lot of interest in madtech for quite some time now. The way cookie ids helped in saving time for marketers by identifying them and remembering details about them to make the browsing experience better is commendable.
But since cookies could be disabled on certain browsers, by changing through browser settings, it’s no wonder that marketers were willing to touch new avenues. They want to paint a full picture of their customer journey, right from online to offline to reach the customers more efficiently.
The aim is to target the people rather than cookie ids, to create unified profiles for better identifying each customer across all marketing channels. Hence, the next best thing after cookie based ads coming our way is called people based marketing.
It is the future of the advertising ecosystem that is a hyper-personalized way of marketing, enabling direct relationships with consumers to close the gap between online and offline platforms.
