In a recent blog post, Mozilla Firefox unveiled that the latest out of the box version of Firefox will have third party cookie trackers now blocked by default. If you are an avid user of marketing automation, this is a pretty big deal.
Many marketing automation platforms offer website tracking of prospects and leads that enter your website and marketing funnel, through the use of browser cookies – which effectively allow you to see when identified and anonymous contacts are hitting particular pages and give you the ability to take action like changing their lead score or triggering a notification to a salesperson. With visibility into web tracking, you have a deeper ability to passively see where your prospects and leads are at in your customer journey.
But Firefox’s recent change will block those platform trackers – regardless of whether you’re on Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua, or even smaller trackers, it’s likely that they’re now blocked from Firefox. You can see the full list of blocked domains here from Disconnect.me, which Firefox relies on to determine who to block.
While Firefox doesn’t have a critical mass of all web users (estimates are around 10% of all browsers), they do make up a significant amount of web traffic. And given not only this change, but also the increasing awareness of internet privacy concerns – it’s important to make sure you aren’t always relying on this tracking data for categorizing and classifying your prospects and leads, or worse, triggering actions solely based on this tracking-enabled criteria.
How to move forward with marketing automation after Firefox tracker blocking
Lobby that your MA platform become eligible for de-listing from Disconnect.me
Based on their criteria, they explain it is possible for these trackers to be de-listed if they meet the conditions that they “require users to transparently and explicitly opt in to collection and retention.”
Some international organizations are doing this on their own based on concerns over GDPR regulations, but in order for these trackers to be de-listed, it will have to become a requirement for implementation for every single one of their own customers (including you).
Hopefully your platform is aware of this change, but we’d recommend you reach out to your dedicated rep to let it be known you want them to investigate de-listing. A good SaaS platform listens to its user requests, especially a critical mass of them.
Re-configure your workflow triggers if they rely exclusively on web tracking events
In the case of the example in the introduction, if you’re triggering a sales notification based on a contact hitting your pricing page, you’re going to be missing out on that notification with Firefox’s latest change. Not only are tons of marketing automation professionals relying (probably too much) on web tracking to attribute lead score to, but many are assuming (and this is not always a great assumption to begin with) that particular page views are reason enough to qualify a prospect and move them to the next phase in the journey.
While this is valuable information, your flows and triggers should likely only be affirmed by this activity, not initiated because of it. Consider adding failsafe criteria for triggering workflows if you can’t rely on particular page views or web activity.
Cultivate more explicit user actions on site
Just because a tracker now doesn’t allow you to passively collect user browsing activity doesn’t mean you can’t track that same information explicitly from your users through form fills and more direct questions from your users. Information collected in a form is not subject to these tracking limits because there’s an explicitly understood agreement from your user that they’re sending you that information. Done properly, you can control the amount of friction in the user experience on site through collecting a bit more information in a form fill, or series of forms.
Better leverage whitelabeled email click tracking to fill the gaps
While an email click isn’t a guarantee that a person actually made it to the page, it’s a pretty solid indicator. Through email tracking, you can explicitly email a link to where you would want your prospect or lead to go to next (pricing page, case study, etc) and be quite confident they’ve made it there. You are likely going to want to add a preventative measure of white-labeling your email links (in case the platform’s standard link domain is blocked), and you won’t know how long a Firefox user was on the page or where they went next, but it’s better than nothing.
Re-engage your sales team
Marketing automation and the overall simplicity of lead qualification has made it easier than ever to qualify leads for Sales to the point that they don’t even have to be involved except to facilitate the signing on the dotted line.
Without this web tracking capability of Firefox users, it should be communicated to Sales that this is an opportunity to get back into the qualification process and that it may be more difficult to assume every lead they talk to has been as thoroughly qualified as they’d have liked.
If you’ve laid out qualification rules with Sales based on web activity, it may be time to circle back up with the team to figure out alternative ways to qualify those leads with them.
Embrace change
While Firefox is still the browser of choice for a small subset of web users, the impact of this change may be significant to your business. By neglecting to make any changes with this recent blocking of website tracking in your marketing automation platform, you may be leaving revenue on the table.
Instead of just fighting against the change, embrace it, use it as a good reason to re-evaluate your customer journey and marketing automation process to better serve customers as society trends towards being more aware of data tracking and privacy concerns.
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