In our omnipresent digital era, where varied online interactions across platforms shape consumer behavior, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies are increasingly recognizing the importance of leveraging digital website analytics to stay competitive and relevant.
For years, many organizations were content to lean on third-party advertising solutions to reach their target audiences. With the decline of third-party cookies well underway, no organization can rely on impersonal outreach with their audiences. Instead, they must find new avenues of connection directly with their customers. Many CPG organizations are putting a new emphasis on owning a greater share of the relationship with their consumers through active first-party data collection and expanded D2C reach.
The CPG industry, traditionally rooted in manufacturing and distribution, has historically left the largest burden of consumer engagement to its resellers. As digital avenues become further integrated into our lives, it’s no longer possible to ignore that. Consumers are looking online for reviews, nutrition info, recipes, and ultimately: to purchase. By ignoring these key interactions, you miss the critical chance to connect with customers directly, better controlling your brand experience and enabling crucial first-party data collection and insights.
This shift does not mean you merely need to publish a website and check off the box; it’s about bringing value to consumers so that you can gain a deeper understanding of consumer behavior and preferences.
In the coming year, the following trends will be on the minds of many CPG martech leaders:
Owning More of the Consumer Lifecycle: Expanding D2C Footprint
By driving consumers to purchase through in-house D2C channels, you not only control the user experience, but also collect critical data points on your products and users. Running a D2C operation is not easy, though, and carries with it a lot of overhead. A sound digital analytics architecture and framework to integrate with your media buys and understand consumer preferences is paramount.
Consent Mode
For companies leveraging GMP and GA4, Consent Mode is a critical technology that all firms should be looking to implement globally. With Consent Mode, you can ensure compliant and robust data collection while still maintaining a clear view of site performance and user behavior across your digital ecosystem. With Google’s AI and ML tools, you can begin modeling user behavior on all users, not just those who consent to user-level data collection.
Server-Side
As we are already well on the way toward the sunset of third-party cookies, it becomes increasingly important to own the data your team collects from consenting users. CPG organizations are increasingly turning toward server-side data collection to facilitate compliant data collection that more easily integrates with their CDPs and data lakes, providing more consistent data collection and more actionable insights.
Compliance Monitoring
CPG organizations are typically highly decentralized, relying on the expertise and understanding of local teams to translate the global brand power to the needs of their local markets. By relinquishing this control, however, you risk exposing yourself to non-compliant data collection as well as fragmented global standards. To combat this and bring visibility to gaps, CPG organizations are increasingly looking at global compliance solutions to make sure that local markets can efficiently and accurately execute on the global strategy. These compliance solutions look at data collection, consent management, and standards around third-party agency integrations and media campaigns.
Personalization and Customer Experience
Personalization provides the perfect way to put your first-party data collection to use in a way that can benefit users. The key, however, is to provide a clear value proposition for how the collection of user data is beneficial and what the consumer gets in exchange. It’s not enough to say, “Sign up for our newsletter” any more. Instead, you must bring real value (and in a clear and transparent manner) to engage users. Using personalization in a transparent manner to showcase promotions and items of interest to users can help strengthen engagement and trust in your brands.
Final Thoughts
As CPG companies embrace the power of data-driven decision-making, they stand to gain a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving market. The key lies not only in the adoption of advanced analytics tools but also in the ability to interpret and act upon the insights derived from the data. Action is key: there is no purpose to digital analytics collection if you do not have a strategy for how it will bring value to your consumers and your business.
By paying attention to these trends, a sound digital analytics strategy can position CPG organizations to not just survive the changes, but prosper from them.
