9 Steps to Optimizing Zero-Party Data and First-Party Data

If you haven’t started cutting out third-party cookies, you’re falling behind

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Philip Mandelbaum
02/03/2023

Four hands with two pens pointed at a printed data visualization, with their two laptops behind the clipboard holding the document

Wall Street is not Main Street, or even Broadway. While investors cheered Meta’s February 1, 2023, earnings report, and the stock’s “share price soared” nearly 20% in after-hours trading and another 27% the following day, employees, digital businesses, online advertisers and casual Facebook users aren’t feeling the “Meta euphoria.”

Last November, Meta laid off 11,000 workers (increasing the stock price by 5%), and to kick off 2023 CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a “year of efficiency,” using descriptors like “stronger” and “more nimble,” hinting at future staffing cuts. But that’s not all. Although Meta flagship Facebook reached two-billion users in 2022, the organization is planning capital and operational expenditure cuts and a $40-billion stock buyback. Why?

“The social media landscape seems to be rapidly shifting toward short-form video, a space dominated not by Facebook [or Instagram] but by TikTok”
“Brands are finding that campaigns on popular channels such as… Facebook… aren’t driving the measurable results they need to make a solid business case"

Indeed, the social network’s digital advertising business accounted for greater than 97% of its total revenue last quarter — and ad revenue fell 4% year over year; maybe the audio cut out when, during Meta’s Q4 2022 call this month, CFO Susan Li stated outright that “weak advertising demand” continued to haunt the company.

Li, of course, blamed a “volatile macroeconomic landscape” — and she’s not entirely wrong. But, to me, the following responses demonstrate corporate priorities more than corporate obstacles:

There were more tech layoffs in January 2023 than in the entire first half of 2022
Tech firms are chopping all the perks that helped make them famous as startups
Tech startup funding is decreasing
Business Insider said last November that “the era of Big Tech moonshots is over,” as Facebook and its peers pull back on their most ambitious projects (“after many of them failed”)

The real reason for worry — or optimism, depending on perspective — is the “unreliable and inaccurate” tracking data that brands have historically used to target their customers online and off. As I’ve warned, Google is retiring third-party cookies, soon, other data protection initiatives began more than a half decade ago, and Facebook is far from the only social media platform to experience ad revenue declines.

two fingers snapping, symbolizing Snapchat losing ad revenue in 2022 and 2023

The Truth About Third-Party Cookies and Data Privacy

For years now the vast majority of tracking cookies have been rejected by browsers, and every day more and more consumers are blocking them on their own. In fact, nine in 10 consumers are concerned about the privacy of their data online, and just as many said they’ll disengage with a company that breaks their trust — and that was before Apple introduced its tracking-blocker privacy feature.

“Brands are losing signal and brand marketers are no longer able to reliably track and reach their target audiences in the same ways they used to,” lamented Ad Age on February 2, 2023. This is why the companies that ‘get it’ are reevaluating their digital marketing strategy, cutting their ad budgets and shifting much of their remaining spend to the technique that continued to work in 2022 — even with the ever-changing state of consumer data privacy laws.

So, what is this technique? According to Ad Age, it’s obtaining “data that reveal actualized and demonstrated purchasing habits of their customers.”

For Ad Age, this means zero-party data specifically:

Using zero-party data, brands can predict consumer behavior and make informed decisions about product investment and development. While traditional ads are consumed in fleeting moments with intense oversaturation, zero-party data helps brands build stronger, more meaningful connections with shoppers.

And for its sponsored article, Ad Age provided an example:

A popular CPG brand began using zero-party data to guide marketing decisions, using voluntary consumer data to learn more about its ideal shopper. With this knowledge, the brand launched new marketing programs with Fetch, and saw a 79% increase in wallet share at Walmart, 23,000 new buyers and an 18% increase in per-trip spend.

Of course, Fetch is only one ‘consumer engagement and performance marketing’ provider; other options include:

Axios
Got
Node.Fetch (Autofetch)
Request
Reqwest

Plus:

First-party data is nothing to ignore, either
There’s a lot more you need to know before you can fully phase out your use of third-party tracking cookies and actually improve the experiences you deliver for your customers, leads and prospects

A hand dunking a chocolate chip cookie into a glass of milk, with a stack of cookies to the side and cookie crumbs all around, symbolizing the retirement of third-party tracking cookies

How to Enhance Your Digital Marketing, Sales and Customer Experience with Zero-Party Data and First-Party Data

Fortunately, all of these UX enhancements and data-gathering tools benefit your website visitors — and zero-party data and first-party data are the types of data your customers want you to have, as well as the data that can best inform the messages, moments, products and services you provide.

To successfully implement — on your website and other owned properties (e.g., your customer self-service portal) — the user-centered design necessary to facilitate optimal user and customer engagement, you need to understand:

The value of properly collected and managed customer data
The history of and need for data privacy
The best practices for optimizing your site for UX and data collection
The best practices for making zero-party data and first-party data work for you

Preparing Your Website for Optimal UX and Customer Data Collection

It’s not enough to leverage a data capture tool to outperform your competitors; making your site useful, usable, desirable, findable, accessible, credible and valuable is easier said than done. You first have to understand your customers, and how your site performs today. Where have your customers found the most value, and why? What pages inspired users to leave, and why?

To gather insights on your customers:

Use A/B testing tools and conduct usability tests to verify which site features drive the most conversions or keep users on the site the longest
Employ and leverage the learnings from eye tracking technology
Employ feedback widgets that provide actionable insights based on user behaviors
Offer incentives to your prospects and customers for participating in surveys, and solicit feedback via your website and your email and social media marketing

A young mother and her baby look at a laptop in their kitchen

Next, follow these steps to implement, test, optimize and scale your UX enhancements:

Conduct a behavioral audit of the existing digital designs, identifying gaps
Review and identify trends in your customer survey results
Develop new data-driven designs, emphasizing the end user throughout the design and development process
Develop a new content marketing strategy that coincides with your overall marketing and website SEO/UX strategies, considering funnel stage, target user persona, pain points, needs and values (creating true value-add content will lead to more backlinks than writing for the algorithms) — and ensuring you meet all the Google Webmaster Guidelines
Solicit feedback throughout the design process, sharing your mood board, storyboard, wireframes and mockup
Continuously test the new designs and content against carefully selected control conditions, and keep a searchable results library of all experiments
Scale your winning design(s) and content approach(es) across your website
Continually monitor, analyze and iterate based on user behavior

Finally, cross check your changes with the following list of UX-focused website requirements:

Site accessible for all users
Site optimized for mobile (also known as responsive design)
Site speed optimized for mobile with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
Pages optimized for fast loading
Well-organized information architecture and user-friendly navigation
Smart pagination and canonicalization
Use of breadcrumbs
Simple, consistent, visually appealing design
Heavy use of video and images
Use of user interface (UI) elements, such as buttons, slider arrows, navigation bars, dropdown lists and message boxes (also known as interaction design)
Homepage that clearly defines the brand, its values, and its offerings
Straightforward, valuable and properly formatted content
Use of tables of contents, titles and headers
Clear calls to action
Streamlined eCommerce
Easy access to support/contact options
Inclusion of all copyright and legal information

A young Black man shows his two Black female friends a website with optimal UX on his mobile phone

Demonstrating Customer Centricity by Changing Your Policy on Data Collection and Use

To start retiring third-party cookies and implementing tools for better customer data collection and use, follow these nine steps:

Collect zero- and first-party data now, using giveaways like ebooks and discounts for lead generation, as well as surveys and interactive experiences to expand and enhance customer data for better personalization
Obtain authentication as soon as possible, across sources
Redesign your website to focus on user experience and collecting zero- and first-party data
Leverage existing and new, authenticated zero- and first-party data to build audience lists for direct communications as well as retargeting across ad platforms
Reduce and then eliminate the use of all cross-app site tracking
Acquire new customers through lookalike audiences
Develop stronger relationships with high-value customers by using zero- and first-party data to deliver more targeted, individualized experiences
Measure performance via server-side conversion tracking
Actively work toward better data sharing and collaboration among your marketing, sales and CX departments