Role Influencers will play in the post-cookie era

Cookies are little text files that are used to save small amounts of data. Whenever the website is loaded into your browser, cookies are saved on your device. These cookies assist us in making the website work effectively, making it more secure, providing a better user experience, and analyzing how the website performs and what works and what needs to be improved.

Session, persistent, and third-party cookies are the three categories of computer cookies. These nearly imperceptible text files are all unique. These cookies, each with their own goal, are designed to track, gather, and keep whatever data that businesses want.

Session cookies

Temporary cookies that store your online actions are defined as session cookies. Without these cookies, your site surfing log would always be vacant because websites have no sense of memory. In fact, the website would treat the user as if they were an entirely new visitor with each click they make.

Online shopping is a nice illustration of how session cookies may be useful. Users can check out at any time when buying online. Because session cookies keep track of their movements, this is the case. If users didn't have these cookies, their shopping cart would be empty every time they went to check out.

Persistent cookies

Persistent cookies (sometimes referred to as first-party cookies) track your online choices. When you first visit a website, it is set to its default settings. Persistent cookies, on the other hand, will remember and implement your preferences the next time you visit the site if you tailor it to your tastes. This is how computers remember and store information such as your login credentials, language choices, menu settings, internal bookmarks, and so on.

Persistent, permanent, and stored cookies are all phrases that refer to cookies that are retained on your hard drive for a long time (usually). The cookie's lifespan is determined by the expiration date. However, once that date has passed, the cookie, along with everything you modified, will be destroyed. Fortunately, websites prefer to adopt a long-life span so that consumers can take full advantage of their choices.

Third-party cookies

Third-party cookies, often known as tracking cookies, collect information about users online activities. Third-party cookies collect various types of data when users access a site, which is subsequently passed on or sold to advertising by the website that produced the cookie. These cookies collect information about interests, location, age, and search habits so that advertisers may tailor adverts to fit. These are advertisements that appear on websites users visit and show users material that is relevant to their interests.

Third-party cookies in Chrome are being phased out by Google

Google has stated that third-party cookies will no longer be used in Chrome by the end of 2023, joining a growing list of browsers that have abandoned the infamous tracking technique.


Image from TVPage

In a post-cookie era, can influencers still dominate online marketing?

As the influencer marketing sector has grown, it has attracted plenty of support companies and tools to make the process easier for marketers and influencers. Influencer marketing is expected to rise to a market size of $13.8 billion in 2021, up from $1.7 billion when this site first launched in 2016. Furthermore, in 2022, this is predicted to increase by 19 percent to $16.4 billion.

Image from Influencer Marketing Hub

Google's decision to eliminate cookies, which was urged by stricter online-privacy laws in California and Europe, is proving to be a boon to an unexpected community: influencers, who have access to massive amounts of data about their followers and can lawfully share that data when they collaborate with brands on marketing campaigns.

"They give clients genuine data, first-party true reach, first-party views, first-party audience analytics," said Igor Vaks, founder and CEO of CreatorIQ, an influencer-marketing platform used by hundreds of brands, including marketing behemoths like Disney and Unilever, to manage their campaigns. "It suggests that influencer marketing is producing more actual, true signals as a seed for the larger marketing ecosystem."

Vaks told me that this change has been going on for a while, but it's really taken off recently, with influencers authenticating their social media accounts so that brands and tech partners like CreatorIQ can share data for specific campaigns.

"From the inside, we notice that everyone is doing some sort of influencer marketing," Vaks added. "However, we're seeing a greater emphasis on the similarities between paid influencers and your [company's] own superfans and [public relations] efforts, to the point where brands are hiring people to manage influencer programs in-house."

This transition has been discussed with me by creators, agencies, service providers, and analysts, particularly at the recent Influencer Marketing Conference and Expo in Los Angeles. Despite all of the problems that come with being an influencer–long hours, high expectations, and never-ending innovation demands–now is a terrific moment to have a large online following, or even a small but well-defined one.

"We're in the biggest economic boom for influencers the world has ever seen," said Evan Morgenstein, CEO of CelebExperts, which handles a number of internet celebrities. "It doesn't matter if they have 10,000 or 10 million followers; they're making money." Influencers are popular because brands no longer know how to communicate with customers."

A company or its agency could tap a number of third-party data sources in the old online-advertising regime, then target ad campaigns with a high degree of precision. That's becoming increasingly difficult to do legally, and it'll only get more complicated when other states and countries issue their own data privacy regulations.

Brands, on the other hand, still want to know how well their ads are performing and whether they're engaging the proper people in appealing ways. This is where influencer marketing initiatives come into play. Influencers have first-party data from their own fans, which they can lawfully share in aggregated, anonymized form for a specific campaign with a specific business. It has the potential to be a gold mine for astute businesses.

That's where companies like CreatorIQ have established a niche as a "data processor," linking advertisers with influencers in large campaigns–sometimes 30,000 or more at a time. Because their data relates to a carefully defined group of dedicated admirers, nano-influencers have a place in this environment, even if they lack the celebrity or reach of their big-name peers.

"The quantity of the [influencer's] audience is becoming less and less important, and the depth of the audience is becoming increasingly important," said Maayan Gordon, a TikTok consultant and influencer in Spokane, Washington.

Author: Sudit Dhawle


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