Google first announced its intention to deprecate the third party cookie back in January 2020. After years of pushing the date back, 2024 finally saw them take concrete steps and provide a clear timeline. Then, 2024 saw them about turn, and abandon the whole idea in spite of the millions of dollars businesses had sunk into preparing for the "cookie-pocalypse".

This is huge news for a lot of businesses, but it should not impact your approach to user privacy and first party data.

The fact remains that modern consumers expect their data to be handled carefully, and to rely on back-alley exchanges of user information for your business represents a huge risk. You are gambling your customer's trust for short term gains, and that is never a good idea.

As a revenue or marketing leader, it is your responsibility to implement a first party data strategy that enables you to build digital relationships with your customers and leverage that to grow revenue.

This process, as we will discuss, relies on being able to de-anonymise users. While several tools claim a magic bullet to this problem, there are countless privacy concerns and in Europe, are not viable. Instead, you should be focused on authentic conversions from anonymous to known users.

What is a Known User?

Typically, all web visitors are identified via a first-party cookie. This happens the first time you go onto a new website (hence the irritating pop-ups). At first, this cookie is anonymous. It allows the site to distinguish returning visitors from new, for analytics and personalisation purposes, but only as an anonymous session ID.

Essentially to that brand, you are user123. Against that user is stored basic session data the site can legally capture. This includes an IP address and basic information such as location and date/time. Assuming you consent to cookies, this cookie will persist for a pre-determined amount of time ranging from 30 days to 1 year. In that time, they can learn about user123. Essentially the clock starts ticking - they have 30 days to sell you something or they are back to square one.

This is how eCommerce sites maintain your basket after you’ve closed the tab. It’s how they retarget you onsite, learning about your preferences and using it to promote the right brands and colours. It’s also how media sites meter usage for their paywall.

It’s all completely legal, and in our view, perfectly ethical.

First party data allows the website to behave like a shopkeeper, not just a shopfront

The analogy I like to use when it comes to cookies is that of a shoe shop. If I walk into a shoe shop and look at Nike trainers, it’s reasonable for the shopkeeper to notice that. In fact, it would be quite annoying if they were legally forced to forget that fact and start the conversation by asking me what brand of shoes I’m in the market for today.

That’s a first-party cookie. It allows the website to behave like a shopkeeper, not just a shopfront. Some level of information retention is critical to a good shopkeeper and thus, acceptable from our digital shopkeepers.

Keep that shopkeeper vs. shopfront analogy in mind as we’ll come back to it; it’s high time your SaaS website started to behave more like a shopkeeper.

A “known user”, often referred to as an authenticated user, is a user who has “de-anonymised” that first-party cookie by providing some personal details. These personal details are appended to the cookie, taking you from User123 to Tom.

This is done via a “unique identifier”. People often go by multiple names, like Tom or Thomas (and that’s just the ones people use to my face). That’s why we use an email or phone number, the assumption being this is more likely to be the same every time a user enters their details. Whenever these details are entered, we are able to tie that session (and any subsequent sessions on that device) back to the user. A long term relationship has been built.

Why is this so important?

The unique identifier is huge from a technical perspective. It lets us build a complete profile of that user’s engagement with our brand. This includes linking sessions across devices, but also across channels where we might engage with a customer in store, at an event, and so on. We use the unique ID that will be common in every system to compile a single customer view.

Suddenly we can personalise not just on a short, anonymised session history, but on a full and long term picture of our relationship with that user.

This is particularly critical where:

• That engagement takes place over a long period of time.
• That engagement is cross-channel. The unique ID allows siloed data to be merged into a single profile.

Both are key features of the majority of SaaS GTM motions, with long sales cycles and engagement that spans multiple channels. A well publicised Gartner study shows the extent of this, with countless touchpoints across different digital and offline channels influencing a decision. Just 17% of those touchpoints involve “meeting with potential suppliers”.

Why should SaaS GTM Leaders take note?

SaaS businesses have historically neglected to build first party data strategies. The best explanation for this is that our GTM model is most often sales-led.

Bizarrely in this model we achieved the conversion we need - an email or phone number - we just didn’t ever actually invest in the technology to leverage that data via sophisticated digital experiences.

We shipped those email addresses to sales, said good luck, and went off in search of more.

That's to say, the role of the website was quite deliberately that of a “shopfront”.

This is changing.

• 80% of sales interactions will be digital by 2025 (Gartner).
• 75% of buyers avoid direct interactions with sales reps (Gartner).

Your website is no longer a shopfront. It is a shopkeeper, or at least it needs to be if you want to navigate this transition towards digital engagement without sacrificing your ability to influence and forecast deals.

Which brings us back to our main point: SaaS go-to-market teams need to start prioritising converting audiences to known digital users. A proper first party data strategy will yield 3 benefits critical to driving revenue irrespective of the channel: influence, insight and trust.

Influence and Predictability

I thought about labelling this “personalisation”, but I think that gives the complete wrong impression. Personalisation, historically, means using merge fields to make small tweaks that increase both the warmth and fuzziness of a given communication.

At this point it’s beyond table stakes.

Personalisation, in 2024, should mean a deep understanding of the customer, where they are in their personal buyer journey, and their role in the buyer journey of the broader business. Digital channels should reflect that deep understanding just as a skilled salesperson would quickly grasp their prospect’s level of interest, education and influence to adapt their approach.

As mentioned earlier, 80% of sales touchpoints will be digital by 2025. For those with sales-led motions, this means a huge loss of control and influence over buyers. Investing in known audiences is essential to regaining that control and developing the ability to build digital journeys that can educate and influence buyers when your reps aren’t in the room.

Insight

Known users enable two forms of insight critical to a more efficient GTM motion.

1. New, bottom-of-funnel intent signals.

Known users enable far deeper insight into both your go-to-market motion, and your customers’ buyer journey.

Signal-based selling is commonplace across SaaS, typically in pipeline generation. Per Usergems research, 91% of sales leaders say signals are an essential part of their pipeline generation strategy. These signals are typically derived from search intent, LinkedIn engagement, job advertisements, and other easily scraped sources in the public domain.

Therein lies the problem. There is no competitive advantage to be had here - 91% of SaaS businesses leverage signals, and they all leverage the same basic signals. The advantage lies in developing your own signals that can be leveraged further down-funnel to outperform competitors when it comes to engaging, influencing and forecasting potential buyers.

By prioritising conversion of users in the sales process, you can unlock intent signals for every stakeholder in a deal, and equip reps with that data. Do this better than your competitors and you start to really tip the scales in your favour.

2. Content Attribution

By converting users to known, you can begin to build a profile that includes their onsite and offsite (via CRM integration) interactions. This lets platforms like Demand-Genius provide unheard-of insights into how content is driving revenue metrics like deal velocity, close rate, ACV, and even specific conversion points (e.g. demo → proposal).

Why is this so important?

• Improve content strategy. ID specific content gaps - points in the buyer journey underserved by content - and fill them. Understand what works and what doesn’t against more metrics than just clicks and downloads.
• Align Sales and Marketing. Demonstrate how and when to leverage content in support of progressing deals more effectively.
• Demonstrate your value. As a content marketer, you are likely influencing the full customer lifecycle, but attribution all comes back to top-of-funnel. Understand the true impact so the business and marketing team can allocate budgets accordingly.

Privacy and Compliance

Why have we managed to make it about 10 years longer than our B2C cousins without grasping the importance of known audiences? Simple - we took a much more morally questionable approach to the issue of privacy and the goodwill of our target customers.

SaaS go-to-market strategy has centred on capturing contact details by any means necessary and aggressively targeting those prospects.

This evolved out of necessity. Outbound sales was the common model and when covid struck, we sought a way to adapt that strategy to the new world. A critical difference was lost in our haste, though - reaching out cold to business contacts is fair game, but we’re now cold calling people on their mobile in their living room. That is a new level of invasive and one customers are not likely to appreciate.

To add to this, as we’ve seen outbound engagement and conversion rates falter, we’ve sought to up the volume to offset that decline. SDR robots abound, and customers are now faced with an even higher volume of invasive outreach.

It’s hardly surprising we find ourselves in what G2 labels a “Trust Crisis”, with 94% of buyers not trusting sales reps. We are getting more invasive, more aggressive, more persistent.

This has to change, and the key is going to be to build first-party relationships with our audiences. Direct relationships, built on trust and a fair value exchange via digital channels, can repair our relationship with our audiences.

It can also lay the foundation for a more efficient go-to-market, ending a cycle that feels increasingly like chasing our tail in search of the latest technology that can extract a bit more efficiency from a fundamentally broken model.

How to convert known users

The catch-all answer is by building a value exchange. Create content on your website that users want to engage with sufficiently that they will endure a small amount of friction to access it.

For some businesses, this is super obvious. Take publishers, their whole business is built around a content-based value exchange. You might have noticed a growing number of “registration-walls” in recent years - like a paywall but they don’t ask for money, just an account. This is publishers looking to drive known users in preparation for cookie deprecation. They can’t buy information on you anymore, so they need to build their own.

In SaaS, value exchange is less built into our websites. We provide value via a product, with the website traditionally serving to evangelise that product.

The right value exchange will depend on your product, content, audience, budget, and a range of other factors. I would suggest dropping us a line if you are looking for help, and we can discuss, but some of the site components often leveraged to drive conversions include:

• Gated content (whitepapers, eGuides, etc).
• Documentation, User Guides, How-To’s.
• Interactive Demo.
• Content Hubs. Build onsite curated content hubs, like a digital sales room, so that every prospect is incentivised to register for the site.

I like to call these approaches “the stick”. There is also the option of using “the carrot” - rather than mandatory gates, leverage CTAs and offer benefits. These might be tangible rewards, or just transparently sell the benefit of a better buyer experience.

A few things to keep in mind:

• The value exchange should be appropriate. Think about a journey through your website and the points at which you have built sufficient value and engagement that users will tolerate some friction.
• Content gating is generally seen as a zero-sum game; a whitepaper is gated, or it isn’t. That shouldn’t be the case - invest in basic technology to adapt your gating strategy and value exchange according to a user's buyer journey rather than making content-led decisions.
• Build trust in how you use data. Prioritise security and be deliberate in your communications. If your users think they’ll be hammered with spam, they’ll either bounce or you’ll find yourself picking up very high purchasing intent from mickey@mouse.com.

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