‘Tracking cookies’ allow you to provide your customers and visitors, with an uninterrupted experience with your brand.
Tracking cookies are the centerpiece of most of the automation marketing technologies and website analytics. More and more companies implement them on their websites today to measure their audience, nurture their prospects and leads. Internet didn’t change the way people do business, they just moved it to a virtual place, providing marketers with a more robust way to collect information and personalize content.
To represent that with a non-technical reference, it is like a super techy bell that you would attach to your store’s door that would let you know when someone enters. It also displays unique information about previous intra-store behavior right on your smartwatch.
This super awesome bell tells you the behavior history of the person that enters your store and also drops a little tracker in their backpack. This tracker will stay in their backpack as long as, if like me, he doesn’t clean up his backpack when he gets home. However, this little tracker only works inside your store infrastructure with your equipment, and you cannot track the behavior outside of your propriety (I mean you could… but DM me @charlesck1 to chat about it). When your visitors clean their backpack (or your cookies) in their browser, they get back to anonymous land. To recognize them in the future, they would need to re-enter your store and ask you a new question.
How do Marketing Tracking cookies work?
This is a small tiny pixel that is, most of the time, in the header of a website that contains unique information. It is like a virtual handshake between a computer IP and the website domain. At first, this handshake is anonymous until someone introduces himself by signing up to a newsletter or enter his contact information in a form. Once someone gives his information, most of the marketing automation software will retroactively retrieve all the previous interactions.
Without marketing trackers, there are no scoring models, personalized trigger messages or website analytics.
Scoring models are super important for modern marketers because companies can measure the engagement with the brand and also put it in perspective. It gives you the option to identify who has been active at any given time and their specific interest. When you combine behavior scoring and persona/profiles grading, you can measure a large number of interactions with your brand and rank them according to your business strategy (It is a post for another day).
Marketing trackers are key to retargeted advertisement.
92 Percent of Consumers Visiting a Retailer’s Website for the First Time Aren’t There to Buy. (Source)
When your anonymous and not known visitors come to your store or visit your B2B website, they might not be ready to buy, but tracking cookies will help you segment them and push retargeted marketing depending on their behavior. There are several ways to remarket your content or products to someone who came several times but didn’t buy anything. Most of the big players, Google Ads, Facebook and Twitter allow remarketing from your website on their ad platform. Have you ever wondered how is it that Facebook or Twitter know that you have shopped for this awesome car that you have not bought yet?
This is how they did it:
How do I clean my cookies.
It is super easy! Follow these instructions.