Earlier this year, Google said it would stop letting marketers use cookies, or data files for tracking consumer browsing behavior, in its Chrome internet browser by 2022. The move signals an end to a roughly 25-year stretch of advertisers using cookies to trace consumers as they surf the internet. The absence of cookies raises a hurdle for marketers, especially hotel marketers, trying to personalize their ads and services for guests.
The ad industry isn’t surprised. Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox have already put the breaks on companies tracking consumers with cookies due to protests from privacy advocates.
Plus, it’s not only cookies. Identifiers on mobile devices are also an endangered species.
“Mobile IDs aren’t long for this world,” said Dave Goulden, vice president of product at Sojern, a travel-focused advertising tech startup.
The end of cookies and mobile identifiers affects all marketers. But hotel marketers may feel it more than most. The reason? Only a minority of guests at a hotel are repeat visitors, so the hotel may have a hard time knowing anything about a site visitor.
If you, as a hotel marketer, are trying to persuade a visitor to your hotel website to book, you need to know as much about the customer as you can to pitch a relevant deal. Yet most travelers never visit the same hotel twice, so the typical hotel may know nothing about a visitor to its site.
WHAT ARE HOTEL MARKETERS TO DO?
Hoteliers will need to work harder in a post-cookie world to ask travelers to share their email addresses and other details.
“What we’ll see in the next year is a shift from third-party cookies to new identifiers based on first-party information,” said Travis Clinger, senior vice president and head of addressability and ecosystem at LiveRamp, a public company that specializes in advertising tech and data connectivity.
Hoteliers will take the “first-party data” they collect and hire tech vendors to suss out who is visiting their hotel sites and apps. The tech vendors essentially match email addresses with ones that consumers voluntarily have given companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, to sign in for services such as email, photo sharing, and shopping.
