The majority of executives are ill-equipped to track about consumers’ preferences and behaviour online following Google’s plans to eliminate third-party cookies.
Research from Optimizely, which surveyed marketing, e-commerce and IT executives across six global markets found that a massive 97% were unprepared for the coming changes due to take effect at the end of 2024.
“While executives know that investing in personalisation and experimentation is key to survive in the new reality of digital experiences, they too often feel they don’t have a streamlined, intuitive toolkit to implement effective campaigns at scale,” said Shafqat Islam, CMO at Optimizely.
“Accessing marketing solutions that create personalised digital platforms without third-party data will be key to thriving in the coming decades,” he added.
Personalisation of products and services is expected to be a key consumer battleground in the near future. According to research from McKinsey, over 75% of consumers are more likely to consider buying products from brands that invest in personalisation.
However, 86% of respondents believe their personalisation capabilities are inadequate.
With Google phasing out third-party cookies, brands need to begin prioritising engaging with their customers, to learn their behaviours, preferences and more. Instead, brands need to develop creative campaigns to derive data and customer engagement.
However, there is concern surrounding this too – nearly half of respondents fear that an ineffective personalisation campaign will result in reduced future marketing budgets.
Those already working on personalisation experiences are already facing stiff challenges, including uncertainty on how to understand and track success for these campaigns, as no single metric is being used across the board.
Optimizely’s research estimates that only 9% of personalisation strategies have reached full implementation from 64% started.
The research has highlighted one clear message – customer personalisation tactics need to be prioritised in order to improve engagements. Now that executives cannot rely on Google and AI for data, they must focus their efforts on reaching the customer where they must to build useful personalisation campaigns.