What is Privacy First and how does it kill your ROAS?

Privacy for everyone

Have you ever looked at a sweater on a company’s website and then found yourself looking at multiple ads for this exact sweater afterwards? This is called tracking and retargeting and it’s an incredibly powerful tool for marketers like you and me.

But there’s one problem: It’s not as easy to do this anymore as it was a few years back. And that’s primarily due to Privacy First regulations.

At first glance, Privacy First seems like a good thing. We all like a little more privacy here and there when it comes to private browsing, don’t we? (Especially, when you get ads for a sweater that you already bought!) But when it comes to advertising, this whole concept can be a huge hurdle for you while running ads.

So what exactly is Privacy First?

Privacy First

Privacy First Marketing is nothing else than the correct handling of all sensitive user data within your marketing activities. A list of such sensitive information might include an IP or email address, a telephone number, and even financial information. And in order to ensure that this sensitive data isn’t being tracked and forwarded to third parties without consent, there are regulations like the GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, or POPI.

But why should you care about those regulations? Wouldn’t it be easier to just go about it like in the good old days?

Well, not really. In case you choose to violate these regulations, you can wind up with some pretty large fines. So if you don’t want to hurt your profit, you should know what to look out for.

That being said, even if you don’t care about the current regulations, there are so called Privacy First browsers, like Brave or Firefox, that help web users to stay under the tracking radar. And they are blocking over 70,000 cookies, pixels, scripts, and trackers, affecting you right at this moment. In fact, right now, your ads are probably already 20-25% less effective than you think.

Even some of the biggest martech companies aren’t able to track their customers accurately anymore because of browsers like this.

So what does this mean for you?

If you keep running ads the same way you did 5 years ago, you’re wasting lots of time and money. Because Privacy First is already killing your Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) and it’s not getting better any time soon.

But okay, let’s stop the fear mongering for just a second here because there’s actually a really effective solution to this problem:

And it’s called: OneTrack!

“Why is OneTrack a solution to this problem?”, you might ask.

There’s a number of reasons why, but let’s go through the most important ones:

1. Third party cookies

Privacy First browsers allow the user to browse the net without being tracked heavily. And if you’ve ever used the incognito mode on a browser, you’ve already taken advantage of Privacy First.

But how does OneTrack help with that?

As you already know by now, Privacy First Browsers are blocking a bunch of cookies. But that goes primarily for third party cookies. First party cookies on the other hand, are not as restricted since they are technically relevant in most situations (e.g. to login on a website). And that’s where OneTrack comes into play.

OneTrack primarily uses first party cookies to track users, so you don’t have to rely on third parties to collect data.

But what about the other stuff that Privacy First browsers are blocking?

Another example would be query parameters that some people are using to track the performance of their campaigns and content. If you’ve never heard of query parameters, you should know that they are just a short snippet of code that you can add to the end of your URL. Nothing super fancy.

(Some people might refer to them as UTM parameters, since every UTM parameter is a query parameter. But not every query parameter is a UTM parameter. A UTM parameter is always indicated by the variable “utm_source”.)

But let’s give you an example of how this looks for clarification.

Let’s say your general URL is https://www.url.com/welcome and you want to track your campaign on Facebook with a query parameter. Then your page URL including the query parameter could look something like this:

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Now let’s take the query parameter apart.

There’s a question mark, and the key value pair “utm_source=Facebook.com”. The value in this case is Facebook since this is where your campaign is running. If you see this combination of a question mark, a key, an equal sign, and a value after the protocol, hostname and page path combination you now know that this indicates a query parameter that is used to track something.

The last part is another key value pair which indicates the click ID in our example.

The keys are always fixed for specific things you want to track, but the value can change depending on the campaign name and other factors.

But what’s the problem with those code snippets?

Privacy First browsers can now detect query parameters and block them, which for you means that, again, you won’t be able to track your potential customers.

OneTrack doesn’t use those query parameters that can easily be restricted. Instead the software relies on special scripts in a first party context that won’t be blocked as easily. So this way, you’re able to track data without having to worry about restrictions like that.

And those are only a couple examples of the tools OneTrack uses to make sure that the data you’re collecting is highly accurate again.

2. Ad blockers

Ad blockers are another example of problems that businesses have to face nowadays when it comes to tracking data. They basically do the same thing as the Privacy First browsers in the first example with the difference that they’re a plug-in on a browser and not the browser itself. So it works a little bit different in the background but essentially has a similar purpose.

Ad blockers have the simple advantage to a user that you don’t have to download another internet browser but you can keep browsing in your favorite browser and only need to install a plug-in.

But again, Ad blockers are usually blocking third party cookies instead of first party cookies, so OneTrack is the perfect solution for the Ad blocker problem as well.

3. GDPR and other regulations

“But what about those regulations your were talking about earlier?”, you might ask.

Well, technically those privacy regulations aren’t actively restricting you. You simply have to comply with them in order to keep away those fines.

If the country you’re selling your products in requires you to follow certain regulations, OneTrack can be integrated for you accordingly and will still track lots of data accurately.

OneTrack as your solution

So there you go, OneTrack is the perfect solution to work around those problems because we’ve been studying the problems that media buyers have experienced in advertising over the past few years and created a product that helps our customers lower their ad costs while simultaneously increasing their conversion rates.

Try it out yourself and you’ll be surprised about how good it works!

Why wait? Schedule your free consultation today and stop wasting your money on ads that don’t work anymore:

https://www.one-track.io/pricing