The "Cookie Apocalypse" is upon us, and hotel marketing and distribution experts should prepare for what's to come, according to one digital marketing expert.
In early January, Google announced it's moving forward with removing third-party internet cookies for Chrome users. These plans have been in the works for years; it was originally set to take place in 2020 but was postponed due to complaints by the ad industry and privacy advocates.
Just 1% of Chrome users, about 30 million people, are being affected now through a test rollout. Google plans to eliminate cookies for all users by the end of this year.
A move like this could potentially cause a shake-up for hoteliers' digital marketing strategies.
Speaking during an interview with the Hotel News Now Podcast Network, Tim Peter, founder and president of Tim Peter & Associates, which provides strategy and digital marketing consulting services, said this change is driven primarily by the European Union and privacy advocates in the U.S.
"This is really an attempt to reduce the amount of information that advertisers, not just Google but all advertisers, can gather about people," he said.
Peter said the hotel industry might not see a sizable change right away. That's not to say, however, that hoteliers shouldn't take some proactive steps now.
"What's really key is paying attention to the effectiveness of your advertising and of your marketing channels to see if you notice any difference in what's being reported," he said. "The particular challenge here is, in very, very early tests, it looks like the problems that people are seeing at the moment are not with how messages are targeted to users and more about the ability to attribute the effectiveness of those ads to the people they're showing them to."
Peter said the biggest mistake hotel marketers and distribution and revenue strategists could make right now is having a knee-jerk reaction.
"You want to work with your agency partners, you want to work with some trusted resources to say, 'What's actually happening here?'" he said.
Taking the time to understand whether a decline in performance is related to a browser tracking issue or due to a specific marketing campaign suddenly not performing well is important, he said.
In Peter's experience, hotel marketing campaigns don't tend to fall off a cliff all at once but rather as a gradual decline over time.
"If you see a big drop-off all at once, especially as we get later in the year when [Google] rolls this out to a wider set of people, that's probably more a sign of attribution and you want to take a chance to look at that," he said. "If your top-line numbers are moving in a big way, that's a bigger problem and you probably want to react a little more quickly."
Hoteliers often have to operate with the mindset of doing more with less, and in the future less data could be available on groups of customers due to this "Cookie Apocalypse," he added.
For Hotel News Now's full conversation with Tim Peter, listen to the podcast above and subscribe to the Hotel News Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find podcasts.