Is CMO the new CRO?

Marketing has lived off tracking users to the fullest extent for years. Tracking has become ever more sophisticated and users became more and more transparent. Based on this vast amount of data many practices like remarketing, generating hyper-targeted audiences and cross-device tracking, have been standards in marketing practice. The Holy Grail of marketing was and is to fully understand your marketing funnel and tweak the leaks in order to raise conversion rate on your page, means commonly subsumed under the term conversion rate optimization or CRO. However through recent developments in the area of data privacy, both legally and technologically, the amount of data available to marketers has been significantly reduced. In light of the GDPR legislation amongst others which has come into effect in 2018 websites that are served to EU citizens are now required to ask for consent before they track users. Depending on the implementation of a consent banner consent rates can go as low as 20%, making it impossible to understand four out of five of your users and their behaviour.

Beside this, several browsers, especially Firefox with its enhanced tracking protection and Safari’s intelligent tracking prevention, which both have significant market share, are also blocking first and third-party cookies to different extents. The amount of data available and the quality of it thus has declined over the last 2 years and will further decline when Google blocks third-party cookies starting 2022 in its Chrome browser. This harms several use cases commonly applied by marketers, be that generating specific audiences being able to serve in session recommendations of products or something as simple as conversion tracking. The implications are not widely understood as in general you cannot be sure whether the users that are consenting are a good representation of your overall audience and whether you can deduce marketing measures and performance from the sample you have from the users you got consent from. Modelling based on the data and making predictions about those users you do not track will see an even bigger rise than it already has in the last years.

Consent Management optimization (CMO) – Get all the consent

In this light optimising your website for higher consent rates will become ever more important. Providing users with the correct information on what you will do with their data and a good means and user flow how to accept consent will in general lead to higher consent rates and thus better data quality and higher amounts of data attributable to users. There are several known ways for marketers on how to approach this: a/b testing, UX optimisations or generating better content for the banner. In general, there is no major difference between optimising newsletter content for higher click rates or optimising a consent management banner to provide higher rates of acceptance. We believe that the implementation of features that raise the level of consent will see companies have better success with their marketing measures. In this regard, we highly recommend implementing a means of monitoring the level of consent on a high-level view for the whole website, but also specifically for certain marketing channels, devices and user segments. The more granular you understand where you’re missing out on consent and the better you can generate hypotheses on how to optimise this, the higher your level of overall acceptance will be and that in turn will boost your marketing performance.

In case you need support with optimising your consent management, implementation of test based optimisation or visualising your current level of consent in a dashboard, feel free to reach out and contact us. We are happy as well to hear which measures your company is currently already taking to raise the level of consent for your company. Let us know what worked for you!

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