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How declared data can supercharge your first-party data strategy

This feature has been written in partnership with our season sponsor BlueConic. Hear more in our Media Briefs episode with Patrick Crane, Director of the Core Sales Team at BlueConic, speaking about how declared data, a first-party data strategy that helps publishers serve their audiences better, increases value for advertisers and drives growth.

What’s going on with third-party cookies?

It’s hard to overstate the sense of confusion that has accompanied Google’s efforts to solve the third-party cookie conundrum. As things stand, cookies are staying in Google’s Chrome browser, but only after four years of talking, testing and timeline shifts.

“I am both completely unsurprised and a little shocked at the way that Google has [announced] this,” Patrick Crane, Director of the Core Sales Team at BlueConic, told an episode of The Publisher Podcast recently. “The way that you might kick a laundry machine down the stairs, it did a lot of damage… there was probably a more straightforward way to get it from level two to level one.”

Google’s gonna Google

To be fair to Google, data privacy it’s not an easy problem to solve when your business is founded on advertising revenue fueled by tracking and retargetting customers via third-party cookies. “Google is going to do what is best for Google,” says Patrick.

And third-party cookies can still be useful. If you're a publisher with multiple websites, third-party cookies are one way to tell if one person is engaging with you across different websites within your portfolio.

However, none of that signals any kind of return to the swashbuckling days of track and target. Privacy is still a huge issue, for everyone from regulators to individual consumers. “And what's been lost is the fact that Safari and Firefox, they've already gotten rid of third-party cookies. We're already living in a post third-party cookie world.”

For Patrick, nothing really changed with Google’s July 2024 announcement that it would not be killing off the third-party cookie.

He says that publishers who already had a first-party data strategy took a look around and said, ‘This is still the direction we're going. Nothing really changes about the fundamentals of what we need to do. Full steam ahead.’

Publishers that haven’t yet instituted a first-party data strategy should avoid seeing Google's third-party cookie reprieve as an excuse to keep doing nothing. “Just crossing your fingers and keeping going with third-party cookies is not a very good strategy,” Patrick says. “Hope is not a strategy.”

Whatever is going on with third-party cookies, a first-party data strategy has come to be seen as a crucial component in the modern publishing toolkit. “The reason first-party data has been so widely adopted is because it can be applied towards anything,” explains Patrick. “Our customers come to view their first-party data as an asset that belongs to the entire enterprise.”

He uses the example of subscription data that allows publishers to learn more about who people are, where they're from, their socioeconomic status and the kinds of things they care about. “That's the type of rich data that your advertisers normally want to target,” says Patrick. “You end up building a moat from your unique first-party data to sustain a modern advertising business as a byproduct of growing a direct-to-consumer business line.”

Declared data

Beyond the idea that it is data collected directly by the publisher, it isn’t always clear what is meant by first-party data.

Patrick says: “People throw ‘first-party data’ on a board slide and say, ‘This is what we're investing in’. Everyone says, ‘Right, go ahead. That sounds good’, but there isn't a lot of interrogation. What does that mean, what data are you collecting and what are you going to use it for?”

Publishers are seeing clear benefits from a range of first-party data capture and analysis techniques, from implicit data that draws inferences from audience behaviour to synthetic data that generates audience insights algorithmically.

However, for Patrick, declared data - data that an individual reader has shared willingly - is the best way to build meaningful audience relationships and deliver insight to advertisers. “It is a real transformation back to the olden days where you have a direct relationship,” he says.

Leveraging normal workflows

Patrick says first-party data is like editorial in a publishing company. “It is a thing in your business that is forever. It is a process, a part of the institution. It is not a project.”

He recommends asking more questions as part of normal workflows where readers are already exchanging data with you, whether that’s signing up for a newsletter, a subscription or an event.

To counter the concern that forms become too long, Patrick recommends progressive profiling. He cites a medical publisher that used a ‘question wall’ to capture extensive information about the medical professionals in their audience.

“They generated, from about two weeks of data, almost 1200 new, fully completed profiles; 33% of the folks who hit that journey completed the whole thing, which was massive for them, in expanding the data they needed for targeting.”

Stepping into the breach

Another tactic to capture declared data is to use interactive surveys, polls and quizzes. Patrick says publishers can take a lot of inspiration from brands in this area.

“Crocs did this with Jibbitz, these little things you can put in the holes on the Crocs," explains Patrick. “They did a personality quiz, ‘What's the right Jibbitz for you?’ and by having it be part of this gamified fun experience, they generated a ton of interesting first-party data.” 

Patrick sees brands constantly trying to find new places where they can spend their money more effectively. “Publishers can step into the breach,” he says.

The pitch is: ‘Hey, I have this great declared set of insights… supplemented by some implicit insights about what people are browsing. All of this is consented. It's not the entire internet, but it is the right audience for you.’

Declared data also supports a better ‘closed loop’, letting publishers go back to advertisers and say: ‘Of the people we showed your ad to, here's who viewed it, here's who clicked it and here’s a subset of people who have become more interested in your products.’

“Before we used to have all this retargeting and all this third-party cookie stuff. Now we've actually got honest-to-God information on people that want to buy blue Crocs or Jibbitz for blue Crocs.”

Start small

Patrick says, “I've had a lot of publishers say ‘we're just not big enough to do stuff like this’. It’s OK to start small. That could just be doing one quiz or doing one survey. That’s still OK.” 

He explains that the more you can learn about your audience, the more value you can give them, the faster you'll generate the first party data you need to have an impact on your business, whether for growing reader revenue or advertising sales.

Patrick also encourages publishers to think about declared first-party data iteratively, in the same way we think about product development. “The first step is the most important one,” he explains. “Take it, learn from it, and then grow from there.”

Studies have found that few publishers convert more than 10% of their audience to paying subscribers. But mitigating churn and fostering retention is challenging in today’s landscape. So what are media and publishing companies to do?

Find out what the leading causes of subscriber churn are, why first-party data is the key to growth and profitability, and what strategies you can employ to retain subscribers and reduce churn in BlueConic’s free resource, A Publisher’s Guide to Mitigating Churn and Increasing Subscriber Retention.

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