Sharm Tank Vol. 15

Nik Sharma
March 01, 2024

Happy Friday!

Hope everyone had a great week. Did you guys hear that The Sopranos is doing a collaboration with Tamogotchi (yes, that Tamogotchi)? It’s called the Tonygotchi and I think every needs one in my life (this is not an ad, I just find this product hilarious).

Anyways, looks like moving everything over to Beehiiv was the right decision! You guys seemed to really enjoy last week’s newsletter, so we’ll continue formatting our newsletter this way.

We’re Hiring!

Director of Paid Media — you will oversee our team of media buyers, providing strategic input around campaigns, how to achieve client results more efficiently, and working with our internal creative and web UX/UI team. You must have good experience to apply for this role.
Account Coordinator — you will work with the BEST account team in eCommerce, supporting them to ensure that our clients always feel a proactive and thoughtful presence from us. You don’t need much experience to apply for this role, you just need to be hungry.
Graphic Designer — this graphic designer role will directly support the Lifecycle team (email, SMS, loyalty, subscription and membership). You should know how to design for email, and also have experience doing so.
Senior Web Developer — in this role you will lead the UX/UI design process from concept to execution, ensuring high-quality deliverables that meet project objectives and deadlines for you designed projects.

The Main Course

This week I want to talk about the deprecation of third-party cookies. I’m sure many of you know, but Google made a decision several years ago to phase out third-party cookies amid growing digital privacy concerns.

For those who don’t know what a cookie is, it’s basically a small block of data placed on almost every website that is used to identify users. Google’s decision to get rid of cookies ultimately compromises the tracking and attribution behind our digital campaigns.

While Google delayed their removal of third-party cookies for a couple years, by the end of 2024, third-party cookies will be phased out from Google’s ecosystem.

I’ve seen plenty of people talk about the ramifications of this decision, but few actually talk about an actionable solution that marketers can take now.

While doing research on the subject, I stumbled upon a refreshingly concrete account from Sentry, an app monitoring platform built for debugging.

Sentry decided to get ahead of action and proactively removed their third-party cookies (among other tracking capabilities).

The company's firsthand experience with the abolition of advertising cookies offers not just a glimpse into the immediate impacts but serves as a beacon for those navigating these uncharted waters.

Let’s break everything down!

The Decision

Sentry's journey into the cookie-less abyss began in July 2023, a decision that seemed almost heretical for many marketers familiar with traditional digital practices.

With Google's timeline for phasing out third-party cookies on Chrome set for the latter half of 2024, Sentry chose proactivity over passivity, opting to divest entirely from user tracking and cookies.

This was not merely an adjustment but a fundamental transformation in how they approached marketing technologies, from attribution and remarketing to Account-Based Marketing (ABM), all of which faced significant impairments post-removal.

Targeting

With the deprecation of third-party cookies impending, marketers are struggling to adapt to a new era where traditional tracking mechanisms, such as pixels and conversion signals, are no longer viable.

Perhaps the biggest victim is Google, the world's largest ad platform. These changes make it difficult to gauge web visitors' purchase intent, thus compromising the effectiveness of various advertising campaigns, including YouTube, Display, and Shopping.

Sentry sought innovative strategies to pivot and identify their target audience without relying on cookies. By shifting towards ad engagement retargeting and focusing on content marketing, Sentry managed to maintain a semblance of a marketing funnel and engage with their audience more effectively.

This approach, coupled with migrating budget towards sponsorships and publishers known to attract their core audience, enabled them to continue reaching their target demographics and build trust, despite the obstacles posed by the loss of traditional retargeting capabilities.

Bidding

The transition away from reliance on pixels and cookies is also impacting bidding strategies. Traditionally, ad platforms utilized conversion signals sent by pixels to optimize bidding algorithms, aiming to target users more likely to convert or meet specific cost per action (CPA) targets.

Companies have to adapt by exploring alternative strategies, such as using Google, Meta's Conversion API (CAPI), and LinkedIn's offline conversion upload, while also navigating legal considerations around privacy regulations.

For Sentry, the shift away from cookie-based tracking resulted in immediate challenges, such as a noticeable increase in cost per click (CPC) on Google searches, highlighting the broader implications of privacy-focused changes on digital marketing efficiency.

Sentry made several adjustments to bidding models. For instance, Google Search campaigns transitioned to Enhanced CPC and Max Clicks strategies, focusing on less direct indicators of user intent than previously possible.

For YouTube and Display campaigns, the strategy shifted towards Target CPV (Cost Per View) and viewable CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions), respectively, aiming to maintain engagement and awareness despite the reduction in direct conversion tracking capabilities.

Attribution

Maybe the most significant hurdle, Sentry needed to alter its reporting and attribution strategies. This included a transition to last-click attribution models due to the inability to track users across multiple touchpoints.

This change required extensive collaboration and restructuring of data models to salvage any usable attribution data, highlighting the complexity and resource-intensiveness of adapting to a cookie-less environment.

Despite these hurdles, the elimination of traditional tracking methods also presented opportunities for innovation in attribution reporting.

For instance, the implementation of self-reported attribution surveys helped Sentry uncover new channels and insights that were previously obscured, demonstrating that alternative methods like UTMs and referral data can still offer valuable directional guidance on the effectiveness of different marketing channels.

Procurement

The marketing technology landscape is not what it once was, growing from 150 options in 2011 to over 11,000 in 2023, as reported by chiefmartec.com. This growth signifies a vast field of potential tools and technologies designed to navigate the new norms of digital advertising, including areas like attribution, account-based marketing, demand-side platforms, connected TV, and analytics.

However, discussions with vendors often hit a roadblock when the topic of privacy and the absence of cookies is brought up, leading to concerns about the viability and effectiveness of these tools under strict privacy policies.

In navigating this complex environment, Sentry identified several critical questions for evaluating prospective marketing tools or renewing contracts with current vendors, focusing on compliance with data protection and privacy regulations (such as GDPR and CCPA), the necessity of tracking scripts, the use of cookies and their functions, data collection and storage practices, and the sharing of user data with third parties.

This scrutiny is essential to ensure that new tools align with privacy policies and legal standards, even as companies like the one mentioned have moved from tools like GA4 to alternatives such as Plausible, paying close attention to the nuances of user tracking and legal compliance.

The Unintended Benefit

Sentry's experiment unearthed unexpected benefits and insights. The removal of cookies not only aligned with their privacy-centric ethos but also paved the way for enhanced user experiences, devoid of intrusive cookie consent banners.

Moreover, it fostered a culture of innovation, compelling the team to explore and adopt new methodologies and tools designed for a cookie-less world.

Sentry's foray into a cookie-less world was not just about compliance; it was a strategic move towards aligning their marketing practices with evolving privacy standards and user expectations.

Their experience offers a blueprint for navigating the challenges and opportunities of marketing in the absence of traditional cookies.

Check out the full blog post here

What We’re Reading This Week

👟 Why Salomon Wants Its Advertising To Be More Than Just ‘Sports Action Porn’

🫙 How Hellmann's Expands The Funnel Through Retail Media

💄 Whatever Happened To The “Fenty Beauty” Effect?

💸 Investment Is (Slowly) Trickling Back Into Ad Tech

🔐 What 8 DTC Brands Are Talking About In 2024

Brand Of The Week

When I first started doing these brand spotlights, I was mostly highlighting smaller DTC brands. But recently, I’ve barely focused on DTC brands. Instead we’ve mostly looked at specific campaigns and marketing activations from large brands.

I don’t want to snub the little guy, but a lot of the time the most interesting ideas require a ton of capital. This long preamble is to say that this should probably be called “campaign of week” rather than “brand of the week.”

Maybe I’ll change it.

ANYWAYS, this week I want to highlight a collaboration that wow’d me. We’re talking about Monica Lewinsky and Reformation.

Yup, you read that correctly. Writer and activist Monica Lewinsky is the face of Reformation’s You’ve Got Power campaign, which features a one-stop hub with voter information in collaboration with Vote.org.

On the surface this collaboration seems out of left field. But Reformation has always been about women’s empowerment and Monica Lewinsky is an icon to several generations of women (spanning Reformation’s customer base).

Given her reputation for speaking out about workplace dynamics, Reformation used Lewinsky to promote their workwear collection.

It’s a genius partnership and one that makes perfect sense for brand, while still remaining completely unexpected.

Check out the campaign here.

Vendor of the Week

When it comes to direct response, there are a few major growth levers you can pull . If you focus on creative, you can drive clickthrough rates down. If you focus on user experience, you can drive conversion rates up. You know how it goes.

But the unsung hero of e-comm growth is retention. Increase your customer’s lifetime value (or average order value) and you have more margin to work with, giving you breathing room for additional testing, allowing you to unlock even more growth in the future (think of it as a cushion that you can rely on during the turbulence of the learning phase)

That’s why we love Smartrr, a Shopify integration that provides a proper brand hub for your most loyal customers. Smartrr is a one-size-fits all solution for any brand subscription or loyalty program. Bundles, anchor dates, or different types of subscriptions, Smartrr does it all.

Learn more about Smartrr here.

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