3 Reasons B2B Marketers Should Not Use Microsites

Crumbling Third Party Cookies Will Impact B2B MarketersIf online advertising isn’t a meaningful part of your B2B marketing program, you may have dismissed the recent uproar caused by Firefox’s decision to block third party cookies.

However, it doesn’t just impact online advertisers. Many B2B marketers will be impacted as well.

One of the biggest casualties will be your campaign microsites.

Third party cookie rules don’t consider who actually runs a website. Have you ever created a microsite with its own catchy domain name? Your cookies will be treated as third party cookies on your campaign microsite.

How Third Party Cookies Impact B2B Microsites

What impact does this have on your marketing? Here are a few things that will be change.

1. Activity Profiles Will Be Incomplete
Do people visit both your microsite and your core site? (Hopefully they do, otherwise why do you have a microsite?)

You will have two profiles for every visitor and you will not have a complete view of what a visitor has done.

2. Dynamic Content Triggers Will Misfire
Someone may be highly engaged on your microsite, but your dynamic content triggers will show basic 101 content when that same person comes back to your corporate site to learn more.

All of the inferred preferences you picked up about a visitor, from content formats to industry, is lost when someone crosses domains.

3. Visitors Will Need To Register Multiple Times
Many marketers today recognize a return visitor and don’t ask visitors to register a second time.

However, if someone registered on your microsite and then visits your corporate site, they will need to register again. Your content, which could have been freely distributed, now is put back behind a registration form, limiting its distribution.

The Simple Solution

The solution is easy: centralize all of your marketing activity on your primary site domain.

The cookies you use to identify visitors and build their profile will always be treated as first party cookies. Subdomains will still work (i.e. campaign.site.com), just make certain your systems set a cookie at the domain level, not on the subdomain.

There are more complicated solutions as well to sync cookies across multiple domains. Although many of these solutions can be adapted to work with Firefox’s new cookie handling rules, implementing and maintaining them across multiple domains is challenging. These solutions can also be used by the online ad networks and data companies Firefox is targeting, so they may be the next target of browser privacy changes.

Your Turn

Are there other activities the loss of third party cookies will impact, or questions you have about the impact? Share them in the comments below or with me on Twitter (@wittlake).

Photo Credit: Werwin15 via Flickr cc

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