First party data is the best data
Since 2019 we’ve heard that the demise of the third-party cookie was imminent – until Google finally decided in July 2024 that they wouldn’t be pulling the plug on third-party cookies after all. Fortunately, five years of uncertainty spurred a lot of conversation about the value of data privacy and many organizations have started building first party data resources. We believe that work should continue.
First-party data comes in two flavors: explicit (things your supporters tell you about themselves, e.g., their email addresses; this is also sometimes called, rather oddly, zero-party data) and implicit (things you infer from their actions, e.g., what areas of your website they visit and how they behave while they’re there). A first party data strategy requires setting up systems to collect, measure and act on this information, in a manner that prioritizes opt-in consent from your community. Blue State has always valued data privacy — we’ve advised our clients to be as transparent as possible when collecting first-party data from user submissions. When building media campaigns, we prioritize using first-party data to reach our clients’ communities for advocacy and action campaigns. This data also helps us build custom lookalike audiences to grow our clients’ communities during acquisition and lead generation campaigns.
First-party data is the backbone of our clients’ campaigns for two main reasons. First, these audiences perform better. Period. We consistently see a higher return on investment for any campaign with a fundraising, advocacy, or acquisition objective when we include audience segments or personalization built off our clients’ first-party data.
Second, first-party data helps our clients build a deeper bond with their communities. When a supporter knows that their data is being used appropriately and to deliver personalized, relevant content to them, their overall relationship with the organization improves.
So why aren’t organizations always able to make the most of it?
First party data is collected at a variety of touchpoints and typically flows into a CRM platform and various other tools we use for email, fundraising, and advertising. Those tools are purpose-built to take advantage of this data to personalize content and calls to action, with the goal of driving more conversions. However, the data integration work can often be bespoke and time consuming for each channel, creating gaps in what an organization should be able to achieve with their suite of tools and what the team is actually able to accomplish. It is also rare for nonprofits to have the capability to apply the same personalization strategies in their websites; open-source content management systems like WordPress and Drupal don’t typically ingest or integrate well with individual user data and they certainly aren’t built to take advantage of it.
To bridge the gap between all of these different systems and provide new capabilities to synchronize data and personalize the supporter experience more holistically, we recommend implementing a CDP, or customer data platform.
How a CDP can harness first-party data to power your marketing program
CDPs are built to collect and unify first party data, using a large number of out-of-the-box connectors to make integrating the various marketing technologies in a client’s stack easier and tracking the history of a user’s activity on a website or app. The CDP can even start building a profile even before we know who the person is, so that when they do identify themselves by signing up for email or donating, we already have some data about what they’ve been up to. The CDP can use its connectors to push that profile and audience data back into other platforms like the email platform, ad platforms, or, importantly, the website.
So what’s the difference between a CDP and a CRM?
A CDP is built to unify data around user profiles, stitching together records from different systems and creating a single, comprehensive profile of each user. You might say, but isn’t that what a CRM like Salesforce or Hubspot is supposed to do? Isn’t the reason clients adopt CRMs to build unified supporter profiles?
The answer is yes, but for different purposes. A CRM is meant to be an organization’s source of truth for every known supporter, receiving data from other platforms in the marketing stack, building profiles, and tracking interactions. But they aren’t necessarily built to make data actionable in real-time, and they aren’t typically able to track activity at the level of granularity as a CDP. CDPs can track every single interaction with a website, combine that data with email or paid media interactions, and use all of that data to personalize experiences in real time. A typical CRM is never going to be able to do that.
What can a CDP help you achieve?
With a CDP, we can build out custom segments based on what people have expressed interest in through both the actions they’ve taken (eg. sign-ups, donations, shares, downloads, etc.) as well as the pages they’ve visited. We can then reach out to people via ads or emails within those segments. That can include potential volunteers or donors, or even just be based around the content they’re already consuming. Integration with a CDP will make tactics like ad remarketing and suppression – which you may be able to do with a fair amount of effort coordinating data from your CRM with ad platforms – quicker and easier.
This also feeds into content, personalization, and customization. If we have someone we identify as being part of an audience, we can customize what sort of messaging or imagery they receive. An international NGO, for instance, can identify a regional issue that a supporter is interested in and then provide more updates about that region.
A CDP also offers attribution solutions to help provide a fuller picture of where people are coming from and then what interactions with the website are getting them to the point of conversion, whether that is reading an article, donating, or signing up to volunteer. A CDP can help measure these conversion journeys with attribution solutions, tracking which campaigns and channels produced these valuable conversions.
Putting these all together, a CDP can bolster your ability to construct custom segmented journeys across email, ads, organic, and web to track people as they move through different stages of content consumption. That means more granularity in how we target, when we connect with people, and how we push them to an ultimate conversion.
From there, a CDP will help give you a better understanding of who your audience is, what they look like and what they’re already interested in. If your organization creates content, a CDP can create an understanding of what each individual visitor is actually looking at that content and how they otherwise interact with you. The value of this data surpasses the aggregate data that third-party tools like Google Analytics provides (eg. X number of people visited this landing page). Overall, a CDP will help you identify who your audience is and importantly who it is not. As a lot of organizations look to audience expansion and diversification, this visibility is very valuable.
How to get started
A CDP can be a powerful addition to your organization’s martech stack, but one obstacle that we’ve heard from many clients is budget. Many of our clients have invested heavily in CRM and marketing platforms like Salesforce and Salesforce Marketing Cloud already, and an additional tool that starts at $60-90k per year simply puts adding a CDP to the platform out of reach.
In Q2 of 2024 we started a partnership with Lytics, a CDP built on Google Cloud Platform powering enterprise brands like Live Nation, Nestlé, Ancestry and Tableau. To provide an affordable solution for the middle market, Lytics has launched a very robust free tier – providing 5 million tracked events per month – that takes the barrier of upfront cost off the table.
This has enabled Blue State to get started piloting CDP programs for our clients that are coordinated with our email campaign and paid media strategies. With turnkey integrations between Lytics and BigQuery, we’re excited to get started bringing web traffic data from Lytics into our analytics workflows. We’re also using Lytics to add lightweight personalization to WordPress and Drupal websites.
We’re excited to partner with Blue State to bring the Lytics Personalization Engine built on Lytics Real-Time CDP to open source web platforms like WordPress and Drupal. This freemium offering is intended to help smaller enterprises – including nonprofits – transform their web CMS into Digital Experience Platforms, with easy access to real-time customer data, insights and personalization.
James McDermott, CEO, Lytics
If you’re looking to get started then please do reach out, we’d love to hear from you.