I Like People More Than Cookies

With Comscore data from July 2015 in hand, more than 50% of the time we spend on digital, we spend it on native apps. Mobile is already first in the United States in time spent. And if the report had covered Spain, the conclusions would have been similar, given the smartphone penetration in our country.

Most consumers concentrate on Google's properties (properties, note the word). And that's no surprise, given the weight of the conversation around mobile use that Google has been insisting on for the last 3 years. This was coming.

And yet some companies in Spain remain obsessed with starting to measure with a site-centric view. A view focused on understanding, for the first time, user behavior across their main websites. And it's a sensible exercise. And it's late. You have to start somewhere.

Cookies fall short when most users are on several platforms. And cookies have been the greatest gift the digital world has offered. And they're no longer a necessary and sufficient condition if you want a holistic view of user behavior across our ecosystem of digital assets. Someone told me a while back that in Spain we handle an average of 5 cookies per person. Work PC (the corporate browser, and the one I choose as my preferred one), smartphones, tablet at home... I don't have a source at hand to confirm that figure, and it makes sense. If we already know our users consume different platforms, browsers, devices, wouldn't it be sensible to measure activity with a single view of the person?

Let me try to describe one of the most frustrating user-experience feelings you've surely been through:

You get an email or a WhatsApp message. It contains a link to Facebook, Twitter, or any other social network whose native app you have installed on your smartphone. You tap the link with your finger and your smartphone detects that the app is already downloaded on it. A message pops up at the top inviting you to use the app instead of continuing to browse in your default browser. You accept. And the link is broken, or the app loses track of the original link. So frustrating, right?

It's a similar feeling to when you talk to a contact center and then they transfer you to another department. No! I don't want to repeat the same thing again. Please, don't do that to me! There are times you'd be willing to give the first call-center agent a gift, just so you don't have to repeat your own story more than once. Maybe it makes sense to record yourself the first time you tell it, to save yourself the effort in the repeats that follow.

Now think about your company's customers and tell me how they feel when they receive different offers across different digital assets. The website's homepage tells me about the campaign that's running on TV, and the app, through someone's oversight, keeps talking to me about a past promotion. And when, by chance (something fairly uncommon in percentage terms), I decide to go to the website to buy the offer, the mobile keeps talking to me about the promotion. That's a shame -in terms of user experience- and a failure of effectiveness, in terms of digital marketing performance.

Web analytics is the creature that digital marketing stole from Business Intelligence (Maldonado, S., 2012). And also from IT departments and the rest of the business departments. Thanks to analytics, the dream of any marketing professional has come true: basing their decisions on data. And on data based on metrics that the rest of the organization finds credible and reliable.

“The further one goes, the less one knows .” Lao Tzu

If you're one of those who already measures all your digital assets on the web in a coherent and consistent way (unique data per user identifier, homogeneous measurement tools across your whole ecosystem, contribution of some assets to others), have you thought about what you're going to do to make the leap to a single view of the person across all devices? This decisive step in digital strategy is what I described as “To Whom” in a past post. The path toward knowing our customers as a necessary step in digital transformation.

Lao Tzu said something like “The further you go, the less you feel you know.” Maybe the way not to have that feeling is to ask for help along the digital path. And I'm sorry to challenge the Chinese philosopher, when it comes to having a single view of the person across all assets. Today it's more than possible. All you need is a holistic view of all your assets, and to consider that every digital asset your company decides to bring to light needs a homogeneous practice when it comes to measuring. The gift of homogeneity in digital measurement is so great that a few examples of the possibilities that open up are enough to size up the opportunity this decision offers:

1. A single view at the unique identifier level (digital ID). The long-desired person view in digital.
2. The ability to personalize content and offers across your whole ecosystem (web, mobile, social media, etc.). Improving, in this way, the possibilities for testing and personalization with a person view.
3. The ability to build your own data platform within your systems (DMP - Data Management Platform)
4. The ability to generate your segmentation (the selection of your audiences) as a basis for starting to buy personalized advertising.
5. Generating personalized offers through other channels of your own company. The first step toward bringing offline and online together (I'll dedicate another post to this stage later on).

And then the battle for differentiation will come around again, once all your competitors are in the same situation. And for now, that's not the case. The possibility of having a homogeneous view of the measurement of all your digital assets, and knowing how to deduplicate data down to a single view of the person, is a desirable future situation for many companies today. This opens a window of competitive advantage that can give you months, even years, depending on the industry you work in.

The Cookie Monster has given us more than a decade of joy, to those of us who dedicate ourselves to getting the most out of digital. We've loved cookies, and yet the EU directive on data protection has given so many headaches to many digital professionals. Thank you, Jim Henson. Let's give our Cookie Monster a hug of gratitude. Your hour hasn't come yet, and it's getting closer. And how much you've helped us!

Sources used: 5 inspiring tips to help you with digital transformation | Hours away from the big legal sweep, and you with these cookies | Maldonado, S., 2012, ”Analítica Web: Medir para triunfar”, Editorial ESIC, 2nd edition, April 2012. | A Marketer’s Guide To Cross-Device Identity | Cookie Monster image | Keep Calm image

Other recommended posts:

• 5 inspiring tips to help you with digital transformation
• Digital transformation is dead
• Digital isolation may cause …
• Four Stages of Digital Competition
• Some lies about digital transformation

Bernardo Crespo is a Digital Transformation Leader and a certified Ontological Coach through Newfield Network in Bogotá (Colombia). Degree in Business Administration from UCLM and final year of a BA Honours in Management and Economics, University of St Andrews. Executive Master's in Relationship Marketing, CRM, and E-Commerce from ICEMD, and lecturer at various business schools in Spain. He worked as digital marketing director at BBVA España.

I currently work helping companies walk the Digital Transformation path at DIVISADERO.

I have discovered, and continue discovering, the beauty of play applied outside of play #gamification