Anonymous Audiences and How to Solve for Them

As regulations continue to change and third-party cookies disappear, many brands will find it harder to get their top-of-funnel marketing right for anonymous audiences. The first stage of the buyer’s journey was historically powered by data management platforms (DMPs), but the third-party cookie-based identity framework that fueled these tools is eventually going away.

It will be much harder for brands to identify and target anonymous audiences, and therefore guide them down purchase paths with personalized, impactful customer experiences.

The vast majority of website traffic is typically driven by unknown visitors. Without a way to intelligently engage these consumers, brands will miss a massive opportunity to acquire and convert prospects.

In a virtual event — Why it’s Time to Replace Your Cookie-Based DMP With Unified Identity — ActionIQ joined partner Neustar to discuss advertising in a cookieless world and how brands can transform anonymous audiences into loyal customers. Here are the top two takeaways from that discussion.

Hear what e.l.f. Beauty believes is critical to success in a cookieless world in the video below:

Anonymous Audiences and How to Solve for Them

1. Focus on Identity Enrichment

Consumers will vary in terms of identity as they enter the marketing funnel — they could be anonymous, pseudo-anonymous or known. Implementing identity resolution processes to resolve and create addressable IDs will help brands better track and understand their customers.

The first step to solving for anonymous audiences is making sure the addressable identifiers you have are accurate.

“It starts with the fuel at the very beginning — that data needs to be clean,” said Brett House, Vice President of Product Marketing & Demand Generation for Marketing Solutions at Neustar. “It needs to be constantly monitored and enriched, and then it needs to be applied in a way that is trustworthy to consumers.”

Next, work on building up the customer profile.

“The more you enrich that information with your own first-party data, the more attributes that you assign the people and the households associated with your first-party data, the more likely that you are going to be able to accurately predict who will commit a certain action,” House said.

Having refined, trustworthy data is essential to activating relevant customer experiences that drive results across marketing, sales and customer service.

See how Michael Kors is approaching identity resolution in the video below:

2. Make Your Data Actionable

Unified customer identities are key in a cookieless world, but just as important is being able to make sense of data and take action on it.

That’s why brands are turning to customer data platforms (CDP), which enable them to ingest, stitch and normalize customer data to create a historically persistent and accurate profile. Operationalizing this customer intelligence enables brands to orchestrate personalized experiences across all brand touchpoints.

“Taking the best of technology and the best of data and bringing it together — that’s the idea of the CDP plus unified identity,” said Zach Van Doren, Senior Director of Partnerships at ActionIQ.

By taking the personalization and experience orchestration capabilities of a CDP — and pairing them with the underlying identity and data framework of an identity provider — brands can not only make more informed decisions, but follow through across all online and offline channels from a single tool.

Check out the full webinar featuring ActionIQ and Neustar to learn more about how you can pair a CDP with trusted identity to thrive in the post-cookie future.

Learn More About Solving for Anonymous Audiences

Download our guide, 12 Acquisition Strategies for Watching the Cookie Sunset to learn how you can replace third-party cookies with first-party data.