Personalisation fears grow despite 4 years of warnings

Marketers might have had 4½ years to get ready for Google to pull the plug on third-party cookies – the first warning was issued in January 2020 – but a whopping 97% of executives report they still feel unprepared for this fundamental shift in how companies will learn about consumers’ preferences and behaviour.

So says a new study from digital experience platform Optimizely, which shows that with over 75% of consumers more likely to consider buying products from brands that personalise, 86% of executives believe their ability to run personalised marketing campaigns is inadequate.

The research, which quizzed 1,000 marketing, ecommerce and IT executives in six markets – the UK, the US, Germany, Sweden, Australia/New Zealand and Singapore – comes at a pivotal moment for marketers, as Google phases out cookies, AI emerges and regulatory threats grow.

Executives broadly agree that personalisation is key to an effective marketing strategy – 62% of marketers have increased their personalisation budget since last year – and they also recognise the specific benefits of experimentation within these efforts.

They say testing can not only identify mistakes (40%), it can also allow for data-driven decisions (40%), pilot new strategies before they are employed (39%), personalise customer experiences (39%), and discover which personalisation strategies work (39%).

However, companies are still widely struggling to implement an effective personalisation strategy.

Executives implementing real-time personalisation experiences face numerous challenges, including a lack of focused analytics (43%), difficulty scaling personalisation programmes (40%), and difficulty activating experiences in real-time (39%).

While 64% have begun implementing real-time personalisation strategies, just 9% have reached full implementation. Many also face process-oriented obstacles: over a third (36%) cite disjointed workflows as a top challenge. In fact, just 26% of executives report having a unified definition of personalisation throughout their organisation.

While virtually all executives surveyed with a personalisation strategy are measuring their ROI, no single metric is used by even half of respondents, suggesting a broad uncertainty on how to understand and track success for these efforts.

Some 43% even fear an ineffective personalisation campaign will result in reduced future marketing budgets.

Many fear Google’s phaseout will leave companies hard-pressed for the data they rely on. To succeed in the upcoming era digital marketing, brands will need to stop relying on third-party data, and instead focus on creative ways to develop campaigns based on data they can discern from consumers directly.

Optimizely chief marketing officer Shafqat Islam said: “This report makes clear that brands are ill-prepared to navigate the emerging, generational shifts in the ways they can reach customers.

“While executives know that investing in personalisation and experimentation is key to survive in the new reality of digital experiences, they too often feel they don’t have a streamlined, intuitive toolkit to implement effective campaigns at scale.

“Accessing marketing solutions that create personalised digital platforms without third-party data will be key to thriving in the coming decades.”