Cookies aren’t just tasty treats for marketers—up until now, they’ve been an essential food group for comms pros to learn about consumer preferences and behavior. And this places us at a pivotal moment for digital marketing—with Google getting ever closer to eliminating cookies, new research from digital experience platform provider Optimizely reveals that nearly all (97 percent) of 1,000 execs surveyed feel unprepared for this foundational shift in how companies will learn about consumers. And with over 75 percent of consumers more likely to consider buying products from brands that personalize, 86 percent believe their ability to run personalized marketing campaigns is inadequate.
The firm’s new report, Personal Problems: How Digital Leaders are Thinking About Personalization Amid the Cookie Crunch, based on a survey of 1,000 marketing, ecommerce and IT execs conducted by Wakefield Research, takes the pulse of marketing personalization as Google phases out cookies, AI saturates operations and regulatory threats grow.
“This report makes clear that brands are ill-prepared to navigate the emerging, generational shifts in the ways they can reach customers,” said Shafqat Islam, CMO at Optimizely, in a news release. “While executives know that investing in personalization and experimentation are 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. Accessing marketing solutions that create personalized digital platforms without third-party data will be key to thriving in the coming decades.”
Executives broadly agree that personalization is key to an effective marketing strategy
Nearly three-quarters (62 percent) of respondents increased their personalization budget since last year. They also recognize the specific benefits of experimentation within these efforts, including its ability to identify mistakes (40 percent), allow for data-driven decisions (40 percent), test strategies before they’re employed (39 percent), personalize customer experiences (39 percent), and discover which personalization strategies work (39 percent).
However, companies are still widely struggling to implement an effective personalization strategy:
Executives implementing real-time personalization experiences face numerous challenges
These include a lack of focused analytics (43 percent), difficulty scaling personalization programs (40 percent), and difficulty activating experiences in real-time (39 percent).
- While 64 percent have begun implementing real-time personalization strategies, just 9 percent have reached full implementation.
- Many also face process-oriented obstacles: over a third (36 percent) cite disjointed workflows as a top challenge.
Just 26 percent of executives report having a unified definition of personalization throughout their organization
While virtually all executives surveyed with a personalization strategy are measuring their ROI, no single metric is used by even half of respondents, suggesting a broad uncertainty on how to understand and track success for these efforts.
Nearly half (43 percent) fear an ineffective personalization campaign will result in reduced future marketing budgets
Google’s phaseout will leave companies hard-pressed for the data they rely on. To succeed in the upcoming era of digital marketing, brands will need to stop relying on third-party data, and instead focus on creative ways to develop campaigns based on data they can discern from consumers directly.
The research is based on a survey of 1,000 marketing, ecommerce and IT executives with a minimum seniority of Director, at companies with a minimum of 100 employees, in 6 markets: US, UK, Germany, Sweden, Australia/NZ, and Singapore, between May 2nd and May 14th, 2024, using an email invitation and an online survey.
