\n<\/p>\n
How do you do digital marketing without third-party cookies? How will it impact your marketing and your marketing technology? Despite several years of warnings, half of marketing professionals don\u2019t think their organizations are ready for deprecation, according to a study by Basis Technologies.<\/p>\n
Sentry.io got rid of all advertising and tracking cookies last July. Elaine Szu, the company\u2019s Vice President of Global Marketing, says that even with more than a year of planning, there were still things that surprised them.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cYou just don\u2019t even necessarily realize how deeply entrenched an advertising cookie can be in the ecosystem and in all the tooling that you use,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sentry provides SaaS error and performance monitoring to developers. The deprecation of cookies wasn\u2019t the only thing behind making this change. Szu and her team were reviewing how the company connects with its customers and were concerned about over-relying on Google for acquisition.<\/p>\n
Dig deeper: <\/em><\/strong>Web analytics is badly broken<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n \u201cMost sane rational marketers would say, \u2018Well, we should delay [getting rid of cookies] as long as possible,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cWe took a slightly different approach. We\u2019ve been thinking about it since 2022. That was largely driven by conversations about our overall customer acquisition strategy, the different sources we look at to get in front of our audience, and the customer journey overall.\u201d<\/p>\n While there was a lot of concern about the impact of this on customer acquisition, there was also a lot of concern about how customers would react if they didn\u2019t<\/em> get rid of cookies. Sentry\u2019s customers are developers and, as Szu put it, \u201cDevelopers by definition are very, very, allergic to being tracked.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Also, developers are hyper-sensitive to anything that even smacks of standard marketing. This has always been at the core of Sentry\u2019s efforts to connect with them.\u00a0<\/p>\n The software Sentry sells is based on an open-source program and is itself open-source. Developers can modify and use it as long as they agree not to compete with the company for two years after purchase. As it says on the company website, \u201cSentry is an open-source company because the right to learn and to share what is learned with others is fundamental to product growth and relevance.\u201d<\/p>\n The community of open-source developers will push back hard if their values aren\u2019t respected. However, if they see a company as authentic and in synch with those values they are incredibly loyal and happily tell others.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been very conscious and thoughtful about the fact that we don\u2019t push monetization or marketing onto that open-source community,\u201d said Szu. \u201cWe\u2019ve really been investing in developer content, technical tutorials, building this more of an educational approach to marketing and letting the developer then choose when they\u2019re ready to speak to us and talk to us.\u201d<\/p>\n In short, their customer base is people who were likely to notice and react positively to Sentry removing cookies from its site.<\/p>\n The Sentry team wasn\u2019t only worried about customer acquisition without cookies. There was also the issue of the impact on their technology and data collection.<\/p>\n Matt Henderson, the company\u2019s global marketing lead, put it this way in a blog post<\/a>: \u201cAs a growth marketer, I was excited at the prospect of it, but then I started thinking about all of the things that are going to break. The initial response I had was to raise concerns for why we shouldn\u2019t do it or to delay it.\u201d<\/p>\n Here are the breakpoints that initially worried him:<\/p>\n For Szu, this meant the team would have to go back to the marketing mindset people used when search marketing was still in its infancy.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s almost like going back to a decade ago when it was less about pushing constantly and moving more towards a pull mechanism,\u201d she said. \u201cYou have to great brand investments that are consistent, that are resonant. More thoughtfulness in the way that you market and educate the world, and using creative ways to get in front of the audience versus trying to force them into your funnel.\u201d<\/p>\n While the Sentry team had a pretty good idea of how the loss of cookies would affect their technology, they didn\u2019t understand all the ways it would affect working with the rest of the digital world. For example, partner peer reviews were an important part of their marketing. Those reviews are driven by using a cookie, so they can\u2019t be used anymore.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not something we anticipated because it\u2019s not something you\u2019re not thinking about,\u201d Szu said. \u201cYou\u2019re thinking more about your directly owned and operated property, tracking attribution, retargeting capabilities. We were aware that retargeting our core tracking would need to be revamped. We knew we would have to focus on UTM parameters and rebuilding all of our business intelligence to build UTM parameters. That was all anticipated. It\u2019s these third parties and other areas that we didn\u2019t really think through.\u201d<\/p>\n Dig deeper: <\/em><\/strong>5 GA4 issues and why they\u2019re a good thing<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n Unanticipated problems with just hosting videos caused them a last-minute problem and delayed the relaunch of the Sentry\u2019s website by two weeks. Sentry had been posting recordings of its workshops to YouTube and then embedding them on their website. However, doing that means YouTube embeds a cookie on the site. Once the team understood that, they had to upload all their videos to Vimeo and then redirected all of the website-hosted videos to Vimeo.<\/p>\n Here is Matt Henderson\u2019s list of the other things they hadn\u2019t realized would cause them problems once they removed all tracks on their website. \u201cSome of these were more due to extreme measures we took by removing user tracking and the cookie banner as a whole, but most were due to the removal of cookies,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n The last point helped the team improve the quality of the website by identifying old pages that hadn\u2019t been updated and weren\u2019t being used properly.<\/p>\n Getting rid of all the cookies requiring visitor consent also let Sentry get rid of a ubiquitous, often overlooked irritant: The consent banner.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat in and of itself is sort of the first disruption that every user has to every website right now,\u201d said Szu. \u201c[Visitors] are like, \u2018I don\u2019t even want to have to think about this. I was just trying to look at this one product.\u2019 So, we were able to reduce the friction in the user experience \u2014 that\u2019s part of our core values.\u201d<\/p>\n The Sentry team knew that the lack of signals with Google would have a severe impact on their traffic. They decided to approach it as an opportunity to learn other ways to find their audience.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cDisplay and other channels were severely hampered after cookie removal,\u201d writes Henderson. \u201cOur traditional retargeting motion died off pretty quickly as we couldn\u2019t use GA4\u2019s audiences or our Google Ads pixel.\u201d<\/p>\n Dig deeper: <\/em><\/strong>Alternatives to third-party cookies: The state of play<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n They decided to rely on ad engagement retargeting \u2014 rather than traditional retargeting \u2014 on most of their ad channels. That isn\u2019t the same thing, of course, but it gave them a semblance of a funnel. So they tailored ads to focus on the middle and bottom of the funnel to their existing audience.<\/p>\n At the same time, they realized prospecting for customers with display ads wasn\u2019t working out for them. Szu and her team repurposed that budget for sponsorships and publishers they knew appealed to their core audience. \u201cThis may produce less flashy conversion counts depending on your business, but it gave us a place to tell our story to our audience,\u201d writes Henderson.\u00a0<\/p>\n Once the cookies were gone, CPC in Google Search increased by about 30%. To mitigate the drop in audience numbers they recommend using hashed pass-backs or offline signals\/APIs and smart strategies like Target CPA bidding and Maximize Conversions.<\/p>\n The specifics of Sentry\u2019s case won\u2019t apply to every organization. How many places have a customer base that will appreciate or even notice the absence of cookies? Szu and Henderson know that. By sharing their journey, they hope people will understand that going cookieless is very doable and can result in better, more creative marketing.\u00a0<\/p>\n As part of the company\u2019s belief that sharing \u201cwhat is learned with others is fundamental to product growth and relevance,\u201d the Sentry team is putting up <\/em>in-depth blog posts about life after cookies<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThe cost of keeping cookies<\/h2>\n
What could go wrong?<\/h2>\n
\n
What they didn\u2019t expect<\/h2>\n
What may break<\/h2>\n
\n
What do you do without targeting data?<\/h2>\n
Strategies for different channels<\/h2>\n
\n