How to Activate and Convert Anonymous Visitors Into Reachable Audiences

Although Google is pushing back its plan to eliminate third-party cookies to the latter half of 2024 (from 2023), advertisers and marketers are still scrambling to figure out how they’ll track website visitors and create personalized experiences without this critical tool. The key to a great consumer experience is data, and this change will be a rude awakening for brands. In a recent survey, 41 percent of marketers have already indicated they're concerned about how to track the information of consumers, including first-time and unknown visitors to their sites.

The concerns surrounding the end of third-party cookies are valid when you consider that anonymous visitors account for up to 98 percent of traffic to the average website. For instance, if you have 400,000 visitors to your site every month, you won't have the data to personalize the experiences for 392,000 of them — that’s a staggering number of missed opportunities if the right data isn't tracked. Thankfully, brands don’t need to worry if they’re proactively taking the right steps to activate and convert anonymous visitors. But the time to start is now.

Building Trust by Honoring Consumer Privacy Can Help Activate Anonymous Visitors

Gone are the old marketing days of slapping an ad in print that targets one age bracket or geographic location to capture sales. In today’s digital world, marketing is far more flexible and must keep pace with real-time behaviors. Third-party cookies had been considered the gold standard to do just that: track consumers through data sharing. However, with data privacy becoming more important to consumers, Apple implementing stricter privacy regulations, and rules such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), businesses are now held accountable for using consumer data appropriately. As a result, companies are already seeing far more anonymous visitors.

The journey of these mostly first-time and unknown visitors often begins with a need, such as replacing a broken vacuum or finding party supplies for a relative’s 50th birthday. Through a personal recommendation, an ad, social media, a search, among other mediums, they become aware of your brand. When they arrive on your site, you have just milliseconds to convince them to stay. In these fleeting moments brands must establish trust. And this isn't a one-off. Once established, brands need to remain trustworthy. If your customers lose faith in you, then you'll likely see them switch over to competitors that offer the privacy they’re seeking.

There are some simple steps you can take to build this trust, including practicing “appropriate knowing” — i.e., only using data to provide real value to your customers. A good way of practicing appropriate knowing is to adopt a dual consumer-centric and data-ethics mindset.

• Don’t collect consumer data simply with the mindset of pulling them down the funnel. Instead, help guide them.
• Consumers want to control their data and purchasing decisions. Collect data ethically and be transparent.
• Tell visitors that their data is being used to improve the consumer experience, not to reach your business goals.

Businesses can attract new visitors and begin a trustworthy relationship with them by combining clear and responsible data use policies in tandem with the transparent and ethical handling of their information. If an anonymous visitor feels they can trust a brand, it's more likely that they will voluntarily give their data to that company by signing up for emails, loyalty and discount programs, or creating a user profile, for example.

With the Loss of Third-Party Cookies, First-Party Data is Critical

The main complaint against cookies from a consumer perspective is the sense of an invasion of privacy. But without being able to collect third-party data and build detailed behavior profiles of customers, how can you know how to market to them in a meaningful way that will convert to sales and loyalty? That's where first-party data comes in.

First-party data is the data you collect from consumers as they interact with your brand’s platforms. This can tell you much about your customers and, more importantly, what they need. Most brands already have an enormous amount of consumer data at their fingertips. While these brands have collected the data, quite a few struggle to tag it correctly and have trouble extracting actionable insights from the data.

Brands need to adapt their tech stacks to fill the gaps with solutions that help them manage first-party data. With the right partner, marketers can use artificial intelligence to collect, tag and analyze their data, meaning they have the time and resources to focus on improving consumer experiences and building brand loyalty.

Personalization Around Real-Time Data and Context

On the surface, the anonymous visitor appears to be just that: unknown and, therefore, unreachable. Contrary to popular belief, it doesn’t actually matter if you know who your shoppers are. It’s always a bonus when visitors create an account and sign in every time they visit your site, but they’ll likely need a reason to sign up.

This is where you can employ the power of contextual marketing. You can learn a ton about your site visitors (such as the devices they use and how/when they access your site) without ever knowing their names. Using this information, along with their locations and referral sources, can help you tailor existing content to their needs.

With the efficient power of AI, brands can collect first-party data and utilize data tagging to give anonymous visitors real-time, personalized experiences. By tracking how visitors interact with products, marketers can adapt both content and context to help them feel understood.

For example, using AI and first-party data collection can help build a powerful profile on anonymous, first-time visitors that can inform a company of when to offer accurate predictive recommendations based on how that visitor has engaged with your content. Perhaps a consumer is showing interest in a product but hasn’t committed to making a purchase. AI can step in and make a predictive recommendation for a similar product or a discount to encourage that visitor to become a customer.

Not all anonymous visitors will budge on their refusal to share private data. That doesn't mean that marketers can't or shouldn't create a valuable, personalized experience for them. The goal should be to encourage first-time visitors to become repeat visitors who then become loyal to a brand with or without giving up their data.

Diane Keng is the CEO and co-founder of Breinify, an AI- powered predictive personalization platform that helps consumer enterprises deliver relevant and personalized experiences at scale.