B2B search marketing is about to get even more challenging. What’s the solution? First-party audiences.
Everyone’s talking about privacy. When Google announced the deprecation of third-party cookies in early 2020, privacy became a hot topic.
The loss of third-party cookies impacts all advertisers and is especially challenging for B2B marketers, who struggle to reach the right audience even with third-party cookies in play.
Let’s review how today’s privacy changes came about – and then look ahead to what it all means for marketers.
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In the early days of the internet, it was the Wild West. No one cared about privacy.
As with anything new, consumers were enamored with going to a website, ordering whatever they wanted and having it show up at their door.
Sure, mail-order had been around for a long time. But it wasn’t exciting to fill out a form, write a check and send it in – only to wait 6-8 weeks for the order to arrive.
The internet changed buying habits forever.
It was possible to find and buy nearly anything online easily. Still, the internet also offered a treasure trove of user data that marketers could tap into for insights into buyer behavior.
Somewhere around the mid-2000s, retargeting was introduced.
I remember being at a search conference around 2005, watching a demo of a new technology that would dynamically serve ads based on users’ search activity and the websites they visited.
My mind was blown. Do you mean we can show different ads to different users based on things we know about them? Sign me up!
No one thought about privacy then either. We were so enamored with this new technology that we never gave privacy a thought.
Privacy becomes a thing
Fast forward to today.
Retargeting is everywhere. Everyone knows when they are being retargeted. And advertisers are often doing it poorly.
Every digital marketer can come up with a handful of bad retargeting they’ve experienced personally.
For me, a memorable one was just after I’d made an online reservation at a hotel for a business trip to Seattle. I was immediately bombarded with ads – from the same hotel I’d just booked, saying, “Book your trip to Seattle now!”
Come on.
I believe that lazy marketers are partly responsible for the privacy changes coming later this year. People are sick of poorly targeted ads that follow them incessantly.
How privacy affects B2B search marketing
B2B search marketing is challenging under any circumstances. Searchers don’t self-identify as B2B users when they perform a search.
And often, the keywords they use are the same keywords a consumer might use, even though each is looking for two different things.
Terms like “insurance,” “security” and even “design software” are vague. The searcher could be looking for services for themselves or their business.
That’s where third-party cookies came in.
Advertisers got excited when Google introduced audience targeting options like affinity and in-market audiences. Finally, a way to layer on audience signals based on search and browsing behavior!
However, audience targeting options are hopelessly consumer-focused. Here are Google’s current affinity segments: