Gleanin’s Post

The beauty of running our own event each year isn’t just the learnings we get by becoming event marketers ourselves. Or that we get to eat our own dog food. Bear with me... I'm about to talk about the exciting topic of cookies and conversion. 🤓 With Safari and Firefox already blocking third-party cookies by default and Google Chrome's plans going back and forth (and back again), we've been preparing for their inevitable phase-out. Context: the event marketers who use Gleanin can choose to use our conversion tracking in addition to, or instead of, setting their own campaign UTM tracking URLs. Currently, our platform generates a tracking script per event created, and marketers can choose to add that script to their campaign conversion pages. Doing so means that they’ll see the number of conversions that each campaign, speaker or exhibitor generates alongside all the usual real-time KPIs (which are not cookie-dependent) in their event insight reports. While I remain sceptical about taking conversion tracking too literally (given how non-linear buying journeys are), we know specific attribution is still crucial for most event marketers and is often used to justify their spend, including their Gleanin subscription. So moving away from a reliance on 3rd party cookies for conversion tracking is crucial for us AND our customers. By early summer this year, we had a couple of solid options in mind, so we started customer conversations. We wanted to learn how THEY were going to deal with the phase-out. We then picked our preferred approach, the one that most aligned with theirs and got to work. ACTIVATE in September was our first testing ground. We needed to see that our new approach would report on conversions missing from AND included in the 3rd party cookie-based results, so running them together was key. And whilst we'd assumed that the Safari and Firefox blocks must have some negative impact, we had no idea of the scale. The results were staggering - our new tracking solution reported a 77% INCREASE in conversions. To be clear, this wasn’t about improved campaign performance; it simply revealed just how many conversions were previously invisible due to browser restrictions. Next steps? We'll be asking our early research customers to run similar experiments, and pending positive results, we'll roll this out in Q1 2025. PS More learnings from the last edition of ACTIVATE to come...