The Post-Third-Party Cookie Era: How First-Party Data Solutions Are Empowering Marketers

As third-party cookies are poised to disappear, marketers are forced to look for alternative ways to target potential customers. Using first-party data powered with AI is quickly emerging as the solution to create better marketing outcomes. There are many first-party data solution providers on the market, each with unique approaches to solving this problem. We examined two approaches through the examples of leading tech providers – Amperity and SoundCommerce.

Live Unified Customer Profiles

Amperity, a leading CDP for consumer brands, enables businesses to aggregate and centralize data from various sources. This AI-powered platform combines CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, and offline channels and sources them into a unified customer profile. These sources build a comprehensive view that empowers marketers to identify and define specific customer segments, enabling more precise personalization and targeted marketing campaigns.

Amperity launched ‘Amperity for Paid Media’ in May of this year. Since then, the company has used industry-leading ad connectors and first-party data to deliver more than 11 billion unified customer profiles each day.

“Marketing is experiencing a generational shift in how they acquire and retain their best customers especially with the deprecation of third-party identifiers and ever-evolving data privacy policies,” said Barry Padgett, CEO of Amperity. “With Amperity, brands and agencies can build first-party audiences and activate their data in hours”.

According to Amperity, brands using unified customer profiles and lookalike audiences over third-party audiences are experiencing a 3X conversion rate and an 85%+ match rate across major ad platforms.

Composable CDP

When speaking with SoundCommerce’s CEO, Eric Best, he stated “Whether you prioritize data collection through APIs, or assume that cookies are eventually going to disappear, what you’re losing is the ability to connect anonymous site behaviors and ad campaign behaviors with personally identifiable customer profiles”.

Best described SoundCommerce as a ‘composable CDP’ – “We call ourselves a retail data platform because the scope of the data that we are collecting on behalf of our customers is broader than what other CDP’s handle.”

To navigate the changing data landscape, ETL platforms (extract, transform, load) and analytics platforms (often hosted in modern data cloud warehouses like Snowflake) have become essential tools. These platforms enable businesses to process and analyze large volumes of data efficiently, ensuring data quality and reliability.

SoundCommerce empowers marketers to understand the analytical aspects of the customer journey with:

• Improved ROAs: SoundCommerce helps marketers define specific segments or audiences to activate through digital marketing campaigns – crucial for delivering personalized, relevant messaging and improving ROAs.
• Profitability Analysis: Understanding the profitability of orders is essential for optimizing marketing strategies – equipping marketers with the tools to gain insights into the financial aspects of their business.

As the digital marketing landscape continues to evolve, the ability to harness first-party data and employ innovative technologies like AI and analytics is becoming increasingly vital. Amperity and SoundCommerce are at the forefront of this transformation, offering solutions that enable marketers to thrive in a cookieless world. By adjusting to these changes and staying abreast of the latest trends, marketers can maintain strong customer relationships and deliver highly personalized experiences.