Medical Marketing Professionals Will Be Among the Hardest Hit by New Third-party Cookie and Privacy Regulations

A newly published industry report takes an in-depth look at forecasted changes in how healthcare marketers will be able to target, track, and engage with patients and consumers online.

Written in anticipation of the impending California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in 2020, pending legislation in other states, and privacy-oriented changes to web browsers, a new healthcare industry POV published titled “Cookies Crumble as Privacy Rises” reviews the forecasted changes in how medical marketers will be able to target, track, and engage with patients and consumers online.

The report discusses why healthcare brands will be affected more than companies in other spaces by the regulatory changes surrounding customer relationship management (CRM) programs, list rentals, and other traditional digital marketing methods.

IMPACT

The use of third-party cookies will be increasingly limited or blocked by more and more web browsers. The healthcare industry is especially affected by this as it is estimated that healthcare websites receive over 45% of their traffic from Safari, Apple’s web browser (where third-party cookies are blocked by default), compared to the U.S. average of just above 30%. Google’s Chrome web browser could follow suit in limiting the amount of data available to marketers as evidenced by a recent announcement in May of 2019.

In addition to dealing with regulatory requirements other industries do not face, the current or pending privacy legislation in California and New York alone is poised to impact almost 20% of active healthcare professionals in the U.S.

It also hypothesizes that producing a statistically significant data read on both diagnosed patients and patients undergoing treatment will become “more difficult and will take more time for program evaluation and optimization—which will prove especially challenging for rare disease programs targeting less than 0.1% of the U.S. population."

Essentially, third-party cookies may soon be rendered obsolete as more and more web browsers are blocking them by default. Since most of the advertising technology that today’s marketers rely on to inform them about how consumers spend their time online—from tracking to targeting—relies on third-party cookies, new approaches to identifying and delivering relevant and valuable content to targeted healthcare audiences must be established.

GMM'S RECOMMENDATIONS

• Stay up-to-date on emerging privacy regulations and how they affect healthcare brands to ensure that your web and email properties are always GDPR compliant and in-line with legislative updates
• Start planning now for the enforcement of the CCPA by assessing ongoing measurement plans for their reliance on data garnered from third-party cookies that will be harder to obtain in 2020
• First-party cookies are allowed in every web browser and are small bits of text that are created as a web user moves from page to page on any given website. Create targeted advertising campaigns using search engine marketing (SEM)-informed keywords, to utilizes these first-party cookies
• Focus ad targeting on targeted endemic programs for proven health conditions within your direct to consumer (DTC) campaigns; this way you can rely on information collected by publishers about their sites’ visitors

Grey Matter Marketing is a full-service, award-winning marketing performance agency working exclusively with medtech companies and we’d love to help you navigate your web design strategy as well as email campaigns to make sure you stay GDPR compliant while delivering valuable content and information to your target audience. Our overarching goal is to help achieve and sustain an unfair competitive advantage for our clients through our signature core competency: Category Design. We focus on solving your toughest business challenges by uncovering and leveraging your greatest strengths to create—not just capture—value in the new outcomes-based healthcare environment. Our execution strategies for clients are always metric-driven to build demand, increase revenue, and win as a Category King. 

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