Rachel Begg
Although they are sometimes maligned by privacy advocates as a point of vulnerability, from a digital marketing perspective cookies can be extremely valuable. Most of the reasons why you don't want to get rid of cookies involve your organization's ability to gather data about visitors to your website and what they are doing.
Learning About Lead Sources
One of the most common reasons that today's organizations use cookies is because of how effective they can be for learning about where page visitors are coming from. Cookies can help you determine if a visitor to your site came from your social media profile, a marketing email, a search engine, or another kind of channel. This data is integral for measuring the ROI of your lead generation campaigns: with this information you can see which types of marketing efforts are having the most success bringing in new visitors to your website, which will quickly help you understand where your lead generation efforts need work.
Finding Out What Your Visitors Are Doing
Getting people to your website is obviously important, but you also need to make sure that they are doing what you want them to do once they get there. Through the use of cookies, you can determine which pages your visitors are interacting with and what they are doing on them.
According to Pamela Vaughan at HubSpot, using cookies in this way is critical for helping you optimize your website under the closed-loop marketing strategy, which involves plenty of communication between sales and marketing teams. Learning what your visitors are doing on your page will be critical to optimizing your site for more efficient visitor-to-lead conversions.
Allowing Visitors to Pick Up Where They Left Off
If you run an eCommerce website where your customers can build a shopping cart and save it for later, cookies are a critical component for this functionality. Cookies also give you the benefit of allowing your page visitors to engage in customizable tools, like product builders, without losing the data that they input into these tools when they browse away from your site. This element of convenience can make accessing your page a much more enjoyable experience.
Retargeting
Many marketers hail retargeting as number one among the reasons why you don't want to get rid of cookies. With retargeting, you have the ability to engage people who visited your site even when they are no longer browsing your page. The basic process of retargeting is simple; when a user browses your website, a cookie logs their visit and stays in their browser. From that point forward, when visitors are browsing the web, your advertising provider displays ads relating to your website again to re-engage the prospect and give you another chance to convert them into a customer. Because of how valuable retargeting is, it is important that you have the right service provider that gives you the best possible ROI on retargeting.
Cookies are some of the most powerful arrows that web marketers have in their quivers. These four reasons why you don't want to get rid of cookies should help you understand why cookies are so crucial to gathering sufficient intelligence on your marketing campaign.
