Marketers and technology vendors have been preparing for this trend for several years. Depreciation of third-party cookies.
In January, the conversation around the topic intensified as Google announced it was taking action. When a company the size of Google makes a change like this, it’s hard to figure out how it will impact all the different tools and pipelines in a typical B2B marketing mix (including G2).Therefore, we would like to clarify how this will impact our G2 customers Marketing solutions product.
From the perspective of the entire industry, the devaluation of third-party cookies is a very big thing. There’s no doubt it will impact how marketers collect and use data. But there should be no changes to how G2 customers interact with activity and intent data in G2 Marketplace.
In fact, in an era when third-party tracking has become more challenging, G2’s proprietary technology intent data – Collected only from market channels we own – without interference that other data providers may experience.
Taking a Step Back: The Basics of Third-Party Cookies
Before we dive into what this all means for G2, let’s take a moment to explain the background.
For the uninitiated: third-party cookies on your web browser are a bit like someone putting a tracking device on your car. They will be able to see where you are and what you are doing and even track you. You may not even realize you are being tracked!
When you see an ad on a website, there’s a good chance that algorithms have processed a lot of data collected about you over time to provide you with (hopefully!) highly relevant products.
This has been the status quo on the open web for some time, and companies like Meta have built a multi-billion dollar industry around this advertising technology.Today, due to legislative pressure and changes Public sentiment around data privacy Around the world, this is starting to change.
By the end of 2024, it will be very, very difficult for companies to track you online. So how will this change affect G2 customers?
Due to our emphasis on first-party data, G2 buyer intent data will not be affected
At G2, we do not use third-party cookies to track our buyer intent campaigns. So if you are using G2 Buyer’s intentionwhich provides rich data on activity happening in our marketplace related to purchase intent, you won’t notice any changes in your data.
Our products are unique in the field of intent because we are only Provider that provides insights into user behavior on G2. Because we have a marketplace where 90 million buyers a year discover, buy, and manage their software, this is our first-party data (and to you, the user of this data, it’s second-party).
Of course, we help software sellers connect with these buyers, but when buyers want to remain anonymous, we do not reveal their identities. Our buyer intent is built around company-level intent; B2B software purchases are typically not decisions made by one person or in one day, so we help our sellers focus on the buyers who are most likely to become lifelong customer matches Teams, organizations and companies.
We have never intended to be a provider of personally identifiable information (PII), so abandoning third-party cookies will not impact G2 Buyer Intent users.
Understand your profile traffic
Intent isn’t the only way we track buyer interactions on G2; we also provide data on buyers who visit a supplier’s G2 profile and website to help the supplier understand the role G2 reviews play in the buyer’s journey.This can be done using our recently released UTM parametersor use our Track Your Prospects feature.
UTM parameters are a simple way to track G2 referral traffic and fit into most people’s current marketing analysis workflow. Even better, there are no third-party cookie issues.
We’re making small adjustments to the technology used by Track Your Prospects to monitor Two-way Traffic between the provider’s site and its G2 profile. As a user, if we didn’t share this deep dive, you might not even notice this shift.
Although Track Your Prospects is built using third-party cookies, we never track visitors broadly across the web. We apply this tracking to a very strict use case: determining whether the same person (browser) visited two different websites – our client’s website and their G2.com profile.
Leveraging third-party cookies is a simple and straightforward way to capture traffic, but luckily there are plenty of other ways to do it. We are transitioning to a lightweight, proprietary method of browser fingerprinting that involves creating a basically unique profile of the browser visiting a website, looking up information from browser type and version, device information, and IP address. Extract data from data.
We can compare these browser profiles between G2.com traffic and customer web traffic to establish reliable bidirectional referral traffic metrics. Even better, if you already have our Track Your Leads script on your site, we can replace it with a cookie without you having to do anything.
Data privacy and the future of tracking in the age of artificial intelligence
As cookieless tracking evolves, the loss of third-party cookies may have unexpected knock-on effects, and Artificial intelligence era We can be sure that there will be more changes to come in the marketing technology space.
Fortunately, keeping up with the rapid pace of technology innovation is core to our mission as the ultimate trusted source for B2B software.
Our product and research teams are dedicated to supporting software and service providers as a reliable and trustworthy partner, connecting you to millions of buyers on our G2 marketplace.
