Rethinking Data: How Zero-Party Strategies Are Rewriting Measurement and Attribution

Measuring campaign results and monitoring data analytics are key parts of any marketing organization; after all, proving your team’s ROI can sometimes pay off down the line when budgets are impacted. The rise of privacy expectations and regulatory bodies clamping down on third-party tracking has begun to dismantle many marketing teams’ reliance on cookies, the digital bits of data stored in users’ browsers that allow websites to recognize them on future visits.

Losing such visibility can impact how teams measure campaign performance and generate insights. We’ve discussed the importance of collecting your own first-party data, but there is another set of data that is becoming paramount: zero-party.

The rise of transparency and consent

If first-party data is considered the foundation of your analytics, zero-party data may be your holy grail. While the former grants you key pieces of information such as contact details (email, phone, address), purchase or order history, subscription information and more, it doesn’t exactly tell you more information beyond that. Marketing teams often have to infer their audience’s characteristics from browsing behavior and digital crumbs. Oftentimes, they won’t have a customer’s current preferences or needs on hand as they push out promotional emails or activate ad campaigns.

Enter zero-party data, or information that is voluntarily shared by audiences for the purposes of having their preferences recognized. It is increasingly considered one of the safest and most effective types of data collected in the industry due to its key pillar: consent.

You may already be engaging in zero-data collection if you run preference centers, surveys or loyalty programs on your website. The idea is that this set of data has been intentionally shared by customers and is therefore more accurate and trustworthy than insights you might have gleaned from tracking behavior or guessing intent. And of course, it’s considered transparent and privacy-protected, because customers are willing to share what they want to share. Instead of being collected in the background without customers' knowledge, zero-party data puts customer consent and clear permission first.

Zero-party versus first-party data

If you’re familiar with the differences between first-party and third-party data, you may be wondering where zero-party data comes into the equation. After all, the first-party data you’ve collected in your CDP (customer data platform) is valuable enough in itself, right? Those customers willingly gave their email addresses in exchange for an offer or lead magnet.

But while you may be able to infer that your audiences are interested in specific products based on click behavior or website views, they haven’t yet explicitly told you. For that reason, any observations you make on their behavior may not be as accurate as zero-party data that is shared voluntarily and directly by customers.

Building a cookieless strategy

With ongoing efforts by companies like Google and Facebook to figure out a changing digital landscape that’s mandating clearer choices and informed decisions for users, marketing organizations now have to contend with going "cookieless" — at least, as much as possible.

Relying less on third-party tracking may sound difficult for some, with many leaders reported to still rely on cookies just a few years ago, but it is not out of reach. Data should still be the core part of any marketing strategy, but your first-party data and owned channels will need to be even more robust than before. Ensure you have a centralized database to analyze data points from website interactions, email deployments and customer surveys, and make your value propositions clear and enticing for users. Brand equity and positioning can also be key, as the trust built over time will lead to more loyal users willing to share their information.

Another important component of a cookieless environment is contextual targeting. This type of targeting focuses on users’ search journeys, allowing audiences to remain anonymous and businesses to stay compliant with privacy regulations, and aligns marketing with what audiences are explicitly searching for or consuming. Consider aligning your content and offerings more with specific contexts and scenarios that your customers may be seeking. Contextual targeting is often considered more effective and efficient due to being able to meet with audiences in a receptive frame of mind.

Look to marketing mix modeling for attribution

Before the rise of digital marketing and advertising, marketing leaders relied on statistical analysis of historical data to see how campaigns and teams were performing. A forecasting methodology that estimates the value or impact of tactics on actual revenue, marketing mix modeling (MMM), sometimes also known as media mix modeling, is seen to be making a type of comeback as data teams look for ways to measure marketing performance that is more accurate than increasingly inflated bot clicks and views. With third-party tracking becoming less reliable and trustworthy and users opting out of cookies, reporting teams will need to adjust their attribution models to ensure the results they’re seeing in their analytics are true and representative of actual users.

With a cookieless future in store and audiences increasingly wary of technological overreach, marketing teams will need to shift from trying to glean as much data as possible from users. They will need to focus on earning that data and making smarter attribution that is more actionable and in the direction of actual intent rather than attribution that is falsely precise. In a world without cookies, the brands that win will be the ones that customers trust to share their data with.