The writing is on the wall for marketing strategies that rely on third-party cookies, which until now, have served as the default infrastructure for enabling digital advertising across the web and other channels.
As consumers become increasingly privacy conscious, data privacy laws are becoming more comprehensive. Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge have already sunsetted third-party cookies. After multiple delays, Google is poised to fully phase cookies out by early 2025, effectively ending third-party cookie data collection once and for all. But Google’s final deprecation date hardly matters: 50% of the web is already cookieless, meaning marketers need effective first-party data strategies now.
First-party data, which comes directly from your interactions with customers, offers a rich source of insights for right-timed ad personalization and omnichannel marketing. Why does this matter? In today’s privacy-focused world, leveraging first-party data is essential for maintaining a deep, effective connection with your audience.
Key takeaways
- With 50% of the web already cookieless and Google’s final deprecation approaching, marketers need effective first-party data strategies now to maintain a competitive advantage.
- First-party data helps businesses in different ways, from targeted advertising to preventing customer loss. These strategies lead to measurable results while building customer trust.
- A unified first-party data strategy breaks down internal silos to create 360° customer profiles that fuel personalized experiences across every touchpoint.
- Building an effective strategy requires eight essential steps, from defining clear goals to investing in the right data collaboration platform.
- Organizations with comprehensive first-party data strategies achieve higher conversion rates, improved customer lifetime value, and sustainable growth in a privacy-first world.
What is first-party data?
First-party data is information that customers share through your company’s owned channels, such as your website or app. This can include a user’s browsing behavior and purchase history, in addition to personally identifiable information (PII) like name, email, and phone number.
Additionally, first-party data includes data stored in your CRM from customer interactions, such as sales inquiries or transcripts from customer service support tickets.
Why is first-party data important?
The importance of first-party data lies in its relevancy and trustworthiness. Because first-party data comes straight from the source – your customers – it’s highly accurate and can yield rich insights into what your audience prefers and how they interact with your brand. This enables you to create more personalized marketing campaigns and customer experiences while protecting customer data.
First-party data use cases
First-party data isn’t just a privacy-compliant alternative to third-party cookies—it’s a strategic asset that unlocks measurable business value across every customer touchpoint. When properly activated, your customer data becomes the foundation for experiences that drive engagement, loyalty, and revenue growth. Here are the key use cases where first-party data delivers transformative results:
- Targeted advertising
- Tailored content
- Personalized customer service
- Improved website experiences
- Loyalty programs
- Reduced customer churn
- A/B testing
1. Targeted advertising
First-party data enables precision targeting that outperforms traditional cookie-based
approaches by delivering higher conversion rates and improved ROI. By leveraging customer purchase history, browsing behavior, and engagement patterns, you can create highly specific audience segments that respond to your messaging with greater accuracy than broad demographic targeting.
Key applications include:
- Lookalike audience creation helps identify prospects who share characteristics with your highest-value customers.
- Cross-channel retargeting re-engages customers across display, social, CTV, and email with consistent messaging.
- Dynamic product recommendations display personalized advertisements for products tailored to an individual’s browsing and purchase history.
- Lifecycle-based targeting delivers different messages to new customers versus loyal advocates.
- Geographic and demographic precision combines location data with customer preferences for hyper-local campaigns.
- Frequency optimization prevents ad fatigue by controlling exposure based on individual engagement patterns.
- Seasonal behavior targeting involves activating campaigns based on historical patterns of seasonal purchases.
2. Tailored content
Content personalization powered by first-party data increases engagement rates significantly while improving conversion performance. Your customer data reveals what content performs well and what resonates with specific audience segments at different stages of their journey.
Strategic content applications:
- Dynamic website personalization customizes homepage content, product recommendations, and messaging based on visitor profiles.
- Email content optimization tailors subject lines, product features, and calls-to-action to individual preferences.
- Blog and resource personalization surfaces relevant educational content based on customer journey stage and interests.
- Interactive content experiences develop quizzes, calculators, and tools that adapt based on user responses.
- Content timing optimization ensures that content is delivered to individual customers at the moments they are most likely to engage with it.
3. Personalized customer service
First-party data transforms customer service from reactive support to proactive relationship building. Service teams equipped with comprehensive customer profiles can resolve issues faster and identify opportunities for deeper engagement.
Service enhancement strategies:
- Predictive support identifies customers likely to need assistance before they contact you.
- Context-aware interactions provide agents with complete customer history across all touchpoints.
- Personalized self-service creates help content and FAQs tailored to specific customer segments.
- Proactive outreach contacts customers about relevant updates, renewals, or opportunities.
- Channel preference optimization routes customers to their preferred communication channels.
4. Improved website experiences
Website personalization driven by first-party data can significantly increase conversion rates by creating more relevant, engaging experiences. Every visitor interaction becomes an opportunity to deliver value that moves them closer to conversion.
Website optimization tactics:
- Dynamic homepage customization displays relevant products, offers, and content based on visitor profiles.
- Smart search functionality delivers search results ranked by individual preferences and past behavior.
- Abandoned cart recovery focuses on creating personalized experiences to re-engage users who did not complete their purchases.
- Progressive profiling gradually collects additional customer information through optimized forms.
- Mobile experience optimization tailors experiences based on device usage patterns and preferences.
5. Loyalty programs
First-party data transforms basic points programs into sophisticated engagement platforms that drive long-term customer value. Data-driven loyalty programs create deeper emotional connections while providing measurable business impact.
Advanced loyalty strategies:
- Tiered reward structures create personalized advancement paths based on individual customer value.
- Behavioral reward triggers offer points for actions beyond purchases, like reviews or referrals.
- Personalized reward catalogs provide rewards based on what you like and what you have redeemed before.
- Surprise and delight campaigns aim to create unexpected rewards that enhance emotional connections with customers.
- Cross-brand partnerships leverage customer data to create relevant partnership opportunities.
- Gamification elements design challenges and achievements tailored to different customer segments.
- Exclusive access programs let loyal customers get early access to products or events based on their loyalty status and preferences.
6. Reduced customer churn
Predictive analytics powered by first-party data can identify at-risk customers with high accuracy, enabling proactive retention efforts that significantly reduce churn rates while improving customer satisfaction.
Churn prevention approaches:
- Early warning systems monitor behavioral indicators that predict customer departure.
- Personalized retention offers are incentives tailored to each customer’s individual needs and preferences.
- Win-back campaigns aim to bring back customers who have stopped purchasing by sending personalized messages and offers.
- Customer success interventions proactively reach out to customers showing signs of dissatisfaction.
- Product usage optimization helps customers maximize value from their purchases through targeted education.
- Competitive intelligence identifies customers researching competitors and intervenes with compelling retention strategies.
7. A/B testing
First-party data enables sophisticated testing strategies that go beyond simple split tests. You can create meaningful segments and measure long-term impact on customer relationships and lifetime value.
Advanced testing methodologies:
- Multivariate testing (MVT) tests multiple variables simultaneously across different customer segments.
- Personalization testing compares personalized experiences against generic alternatives.
- Lifecycle stage testing optimizes messaging and offers for different points in the customer journey.
- Channel effectiveness testing determines optimal communication channels for different customer segments.
- Long-term impact measurement tracks how test variations affect customer lifetime value and retention.
- Cross-channel testing measures the impact of coordinated campaigns across multiple touchpoints.
The key to maximizing these use cases lies in having a unified first-party data strategy that connects customer information across all touchpoints. When your data is properly integrated and activated, each use case reinforces the others, creating a compounding effect that drives sustainable business growth while maintaining customer trust and privacy compliance.
Benefits of having a first-party data strategy
A first-party data strategy is a plan for collecting, connecting and resolving all the available data about your customers and prospects into enterprise-wide, 360° profiles of individuals and entities such as households or small businesses.
For many organizations, customer data is spread across siloed systems. These could include your CRM, CDP, POS system, email and SMS marketing solutions, ERP, and contact center data stores. With a first-party data strategy in place, you can unify these data points, resolve them back to individual customer profiles and make these profiles available to every division or line of business across your organization.
By connecting your customers’ first-party data, you gain a comprehensive view of each customer across channels. This benefits your company by helping you:
- Deliver cohesive and consistent customer experiences
- Access to clearer customer insights
- Maximizes marketing impact
- Preserves customer trust
1. Deliver cohesive, consistent customer experiences thanks to a unified customer view
Achieving a unified customer view breaks down internal silos so you can collaborate seamlessly across the enterprise to deliver more personalized, frictionless customer experiences. Activating your data with a consistent identity framework that can span the broadest range of touchpoints across complex consumer journeys is the key to breaking down data silos, understanding your customer clearly, and getting more out of your technology investments.
Once your first-party data is connected internally with an enterprise identity, you can expand the reach of your marketing by activating your audience data across the digital ecosystem, including CTV/OTT and media networks. You can also begin to create and activate new, high-value audience segments with third-party data partners. This collaboration with your first-party data allows marketers to serve the right message at the right time through targeting and suppressing audiences and delivering personalized experiences across browsers, mobile devices, social platforms, and CTV.
2. Access clearer customer insights that fuel business growth
When you centralize and organize disparate first-party data points, it becomes possible to uncover trends and patterns in customer behavior that would not be visible with incomplete customer profiles or from third-party sources.
The analytics and data science teams in many organizations struggle with incomplete, out-dated and inconsistent customer views. Analytics conducted using fragmented customer views yields inaccurate scoring and ineffective targeting, messaging, offer presentment and worse. Over 40% of data analysts say they spend more than half their time preparing data for use in campaigns. This includes dealing with low-value “plumbing” tasks such as getting disparate data centralized and harmonized, leaving little time for generating the data-driven insights necessary to compete today.
If the entire enterprise is adding relevant data to each profile and that data is used to inform models for Next Best Action, personalization, churn prevention, upsell/cross-sell and more, customers feel valued. As a result, they’re more likely to stay loyal to your brand.
3. Maximize marketing impact by keeping first-party data updated
Advertisers need an effective targeting mechanism that reduces their dependence on third-party cookies and enables them to exceed the marketing performance they’ve experienced in the past. A first-party data strategy ensures your organization keeps your consumer data up to date so you can leverage it more effectively. Segmenting and activating audiences with first-party data not only significantly reduces the signal loss built into cookie deprecation, but it also improves accuracy across the entire journey from reach to conversion through to measurement.
4. Preserve consumer trust
Effective first-party data strategies operate within a framework of mutual value exchange. Customers need to understand both your data handling practices and the benefits they’ll receive if they share their data with you. If you prioritize clear communication and consistently deliver high-quality experiences, you can foster first-party relationships and brand trust while gaining a competitive advantage.
How to build a first-party data strategy
Building a first-party data strategy involves developing a comprehensive plan to collect, manage, and activate data gathered through your owned channels. To get there, you’ll need to:
- Define your goals
- Determine how to measure success
- Build customer trust
- Gather customer data
- Ask customers to share data
- Create a customer journey map
- Fill first-party data gaps
- Invest in the right platform
1. Define your goals
A first-party data strategy can support a whole host of marketing and business outcomes, so you need to decide what success looks like for your organization. Start by identifying specific, measurable objectives that align with your broader business goals. These might include increasing cart size, improving customer service interactions, or driving higher conversion rates. Prioritize key use cases to get started, then expand and build upon early success. A data strategy is a journey, not a destination, so be prepared to continually optimize.
2. Determine how you’ll measure success
Customer identifiers built on first-party data outperform third-party cookies in terms of advertising effectiveness. For example, Omni Hotels & Resorts improved their advertising effectiveness by four times with signal-less solutions from Google’s Display & Video 360 and LiveRamp. To track the ROI on your first-party data investment, evaluate how you can show the impact of your first-party strategy on metrics like customer lifetime value, repeat purchase rate, and churn risk. It’s also important to consider if you’ll need a technology partner with advanced measurement and analytic capabilities.
3. Build customer trust with clear value exchange for sharing data
Key to a successful first-party data strategy is helping customers feel comfortable sharing their personal information and behavioral data with you. Ensure you have clear privacy standards that are easy for customers to understand and access, along with robust internal data governance policies that prevent misuse.
When asking customers to share data, clearly communicate the direct benefits they will receive in return for their data, such as personalized offers, enhanced customer service, or improved product features. This transparency builds trust and reinforces the value exchange, encouraging more customers to opt-in.
4. Gather customer data from across your enterprise
A successful first-party data strategy hinges on the ability to assemble complete and cohesive customer profiles using all available customer data from around your enterprise. To do this, you’ll need to identify any data silos that exist between lines of business and analyze data layouts to determine how you can unify information. During this process, consider the needs of stakeholders outside of marketing and configure permissioning in a way that sets everyone up for success. This will unlock additional use cases for first-party data, such as informing product development and supply chain optimization.
5. Ask customers to share data
Roughly 13% of Americans move every year. How likely are they to update your brand with this new information? But asking all of your customers for their updating mailing address annually is a non-starter – the request is likely to be ignored at best, or turn customers off at worst. Requesting too much information, or doing so in a way that introduces friction into the customer experience, can cause frustration and damage trust.
However, when you establish complete, cohesive customer profiles across your enterprise, data collection morphs into confirming key PII instead of a time-intensive collection of every data point at every interaction. Opt for methods that integrate seamlessly with customer interactions and are perceived as non-intrusive. For instance, consider leveraging transactional interactions for more detailed data collection, such as preferences or feedback during the checkout process. This value exchange is based on trust – customers provide first-party data in exchange for personalized experiences.
6. Create a detailed customer journey map
A customer journey map helps you understand the paths your customers take from initial awareness to conversion, upsell and beyond. By mapping how customers move through the funnel, you can identify touchpoints for collecting data that can be used to segment your audience and personalize your marketing more accurately. This is integral to a successful first-party data strategy because it ultimately allows you to engage customers more effectively across the entire buying lifecycle.
7. Fill first-party data gaps with cost-effective data enrichment
When companies design and implement their first-party data strategies they quickly identify gaps in their contact data and or they notice an over-reliance on one channel vs. another. For example, some retailers use mobile numbers at cash registers to connect to loyalty program data, making email marketing challenging. A sound first-party data strategy enables you to get the highest ROI from your data enrichment efforts such as contact append or attribute append, which fill in missing details by licensing from data sellers. When your first-party house is in order, match rates with data providers improve and you only buy the data you need making your customer records complete.
8. Invest in the right first-party data platform
So, you’re ready to put your first-party data strategy into practice – what tools do you need? A data collaboration platform is the best option to ensure your data is properly managed, integrated, and protected across departments and data systems. A data collaboration technology partner can help you collect and connect all the available first-party data from across your enterprise and assign consistent and persistent Enterprise Identifiers to fuel cohesive customer journeys. A first-party data strategy transforms your organization into a data-driven company fueled by the insights required to make informed business decisions that drive growth in a privacy-centric manner.
Develop a first-party data strategy with LiveRamp
You need better alternatives to third-party cookies to meet customer’s dual expectations for privacy and personalization without sacrificing marketing performance. Identifiers built on first-party data increase advertising effectiveness while maintaining a privacy-first approach.
LiveRamp can help develop a comprehensive consumer data strategy that pairs your first-party data with trusted partner data to unlock more customer insights, reach new audiences, and create more value for your business. Talk to one of our experts about how you can get even more value from your first-party data.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is first-party data?
First-party data is information that customers give directly to your company. They share this data through your website, app, or customer relationship management (CRM) system. This includes browsing behavior, purchase history, email addresses, and other personally identifiable information that comes straight from your customer interactions.
What is second-party data?
Second-party data is another company’s first-party data that they share with you through a direct partnership agreement. It allows you to access additional customer insights from trusted partners while maintaining privacy compliance, unlike purchasing data from unknown third-party sources.
What is third-party data?
Third-party data is information collected by outside companies that do not have a direct connection with your customers. This data is aggregated from various sources and sold to multiple buyers, but it’s becoming less reliable and harder to use due to privacy regulations and cookie deprecation.
How do you collect first-party data?
You collect first-party data through direct customer interactions across your owned channels, such as website analytics, email subscriptions, loyalty programs, purchase transactions, surveys, and social media engagement. The key is offering clear value in exchange for customer information, such as personalized experiences or exclusive offers.
What is a customer data platform (CDP)?
A customer data platform (CDP) is technology that unifies customer data from multiple sources into comprehensive, real-time customer profiles. It collects and organizes first-party data from websites, apps, email systems, and offline interactions to create a single view of each customer for personalized marketing and improved customer experiences.
