A website with no cookies: a marketing challenge?

To answer that, here first is a clear definition of what cookies are, what they are for, and how companies use them.

What is a cookie?

"Cookies take the form of text files, automatically saved by the browser onto the hard disk when a visitor comes to a website. Cookies were developed to improve the user's experience, to let websites remember that a given person has been there. In that way cookies played an important part in the development of the internet as we know it today. Cookies are not malware and they are not viruses. Each cookie has an expiry date, which varies from site to site."

Source: Journal du Net

Cookies can be insignificant to some, a fact of life to others, or downright irritating in their omnipresence across most websites, sometimes making the content unreadable at first glance. The pop-ups used to accept or refuse cookies are sometimes far from explicit about the fact that you can refuse them without that getting in the way of your reading.

What are cookies for?

You can compare cookies to a waiter in a restaurant. When you go to a restaurant, the waiter knows and — over your successive visits — recognises your face, your age bracket, how you dress, your preferences, whether you come with company, and so on. Thanks to that memory the waiter can build a particular bond with you and give you a better experience in their restaurant. Cookies, those waiters with excellent memories, remember certain data that is more or less useful to the website you are visiting.

Cookies can be genuinely useful, because they save your preferences and let websites offer you better suggestions and a more personal experience.

Broadly, cookies are useful for storing:

• your session identifiers

• your display settings

• your behaviour on a site

When cookies know too much

Unfortunately, cookies can store data that is a great deal more personal. In one of my last jobs as a marketing manager, an advertising agency got in touch to offer us their product. The offer was very clear: track users so as to target them extremely precisely, show them personalised advertising, and so get them to buy. As a junior in marketing I took an interest in their offer and we ran a test. The test consisted of installing a line of code in our site. A few days later I was given access to their platform, which listed a pile of data about my former company's visitors and users. It did not take long for me to feel uneasy seeing those dozens of more or less personal data points about ordinary visitors to the website: surname, first name, location (country, town, and even their geographical coordinates), age, socio-professional category, family situation, the websites they visited before and after my former company's site, the various email addresses tied to their browser, and so on. That advertising agency presented itself to the public as an "expert and specialist in privacy and data management".

Even though a great many regulations are in place and respected by a great many websites, there are various ways of working around them, as some "large" sites do, by using analytics that are rather too deep and rather too intrusive. Happily, you can disable and block trackers with a number of tools listed in this article from the CNIL. Blocking trackers also means blocking the resale of your data, and that is your right.

The marketing challenge

In marketing we are mostly interested in so-called "audience measurement" cookies — or, as seen above, those tied to storing your behaviour on a site. At university we are taught that analytics are the very essence of digital marketing and that good performance is inseparable from them. In a company we are given access to the website's analytics tools very quickly, so we can build a marketing strategy from the data of visitors, users and customers. Today at Klaro I am being asked to rethink my marketing around a website with no cookies by default — that is, until the visitor signs up for our app, or gets in touch through our chatbot.

What it changes for the strategy

First, with a cookie-free site it is harder to know how many visits the site gets, or which pages are visited most. So the communication strategy on the site has to be approached differently, with a genuine effort of empathy.

As Andréa Bensaid (CEO at Eskimoz) says in his article "SEO. What else?", "the problem is that personal data is the raw material used to feed lead-generation campaigns. And cookies are indispensable to retargeting, one of the keys to advertising." With a cookie-free website, building a segmented advertising strategy looks rather beside the point.

You can also forget the much-loved "A/B testing". Testing content, or "saving" visitors' choices so as to offer them a dedicated landing page, becomes impossible. Everything has to happen organically.

Making users stakeholders

To make up for that, getting opinions and reviews from visitors and users looks like the most coherent answer. And that is where a new strategy begins: making users genuine stakeholders in the commercial, marketing and communication strategy. It is thanks to them — thanks to you — that we will be able to grow Klaro. So let me take the writing of this article as an opportunity to invite you to share your suggestions and comments, whether about the article, our website, or indeed the application itself if you are one of our users. Because it is together that we go far, and I am counting on your solidarity to support us as a start-up that wants to go a long way while bringing a different strategy with it.

This is an entirely different approach to marketing, and it will have to prove itself. It is a challenge I have agreed to take on, and one that I think will bring me a certain expertise and a different view of my trade.

• To contact me: julie@klaro.cards
• LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/julie-beziat-0b344b71