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How to Create a Buyer Persona for Your Business

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Looking to create a buyer persona for your business? You’re in the right place.

Many companies have experience creating buyer personas. It’s usually done after a day of brainstorming in a meeting room. After the session, documents with demographic and psychographic details (married, have two kids, own a car, etc.)—appear, and the executives are satisfied. They’re even given names—Anna Agency, Billy Blogger, etc.—to remind the marketing team that they’re marketing to actual human beings. 

But these “buyer personas” are then tucked into the recesses of Google Drive, never to be seen again. You spend time “identifying” these personas, yet they have zero effect on any marketing activities.

Why? Because these buyer personas were not created in the right way. As such, they’re not helpful and can’t influence a company’s marketing strategy.

In this post, we’ll learn how to create a buyer persona that you can actually use to impact your business. 

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your target customers. They’re semi-fictional because while they’re not actually real people, they’re based on market research and data you have about existing customers. 

Why are buyer personas important?

While every customer is different, it’s almost impossible for most companies to address all of them individually. (There are exceptions, however, which is why account-based marketing exists.)

However, buyers do generally have similar wants and needs. So, rather than cater to every individual difference, a buyer persona allows you to address those similarities in your marketing.

For example, a hobby blogger and an in-house marketer are entirely different people on the surface. But they do have a similar goal: to get more traffic to their website. So, rather than targeting them differently, we can address the main issue—how to get more traffic—and attract all of them to our business. 

Also, since the buyer personas you’re creating are born out of actual stories related to your buyers, creating a buyer persona will help you understand your customers deeply—how they think and make decisions, who they’re influenced by, and so on. 

This will help you create and align your messaging, product, customer service, etc., with what your customers actually want and need. 

Finally, a buyer persona helps you visualize your buyers. Many companies make the mistake of focusing too inwards and forgetting who their products are serving. A buyer persona serves as a reminder that you are selling to actual people. 

How to create a buyer persona

Creating a buyer persona isn’t about downloading a template and filling it in. It’s about talking to real people and understanding their perspectives. 

Here’s how to create a buyer persona:

1. Find people to interview

Creating a buyer persona means picking up the phone (or, these days, a Zoom call) and talking to your customers. 

That means the first step is to find people to interview. Who should you talk to? The easiest group of people to start with—and the ones you should start with—are your customers. 

Finding them should be relatively easy. You should have a customer relationship management (CRM) tool where you store your customer data. Look through the list and pick out those you’d like to interview. A quick way to narrow the list is to find your best buyers—those who have been with you the longest or spent the most money with you. 

If you’re just starting out and have no customers, don’t worry. You should have a general idea of who your product or service is for. Reach out to these people and see if they would be up for an interview. You can probably find them in their respective communities on Facebook, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Twitter, Reddit, etc. You can also consider attending physical events like conferences and meetups. 

At an early stage, these interviews can simultaneously act as customer development interviews and help you determine product-market fit.

Now, while you should talk to your customers, note that talking only to them isn’t enough. After all, these people have bought from you and used your products or services. They’re clearly satisfied with what they’ve gotten. So, interviewing them might only yield stories where your business got it right. 

Everyone wants to hear good things, but knowing where you came up short is also important. So, beyond your customers, there are other people you should interview. Here are some options:

A. Your users

Users are people who have started a trial with you or used a free version of your product but didn’t convert into a customer. You have users if you’re a SaaS or even a gym that offers a one-month trial. 

Again, this group of people should be relatively easy to find as they would have submitted their contact details to access your trial or free product. For example, if we wanted to interview our users, we could easily find everyone who signed up for our free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools but is not currently a customer.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools signups in the past 7 days.

B. Your sales prospects

This group of people either reached out to your sales team (e.g., for a demo) or talked to your sales team but did not purchase your product. They may not necessarily be users. 

Likewise, your sales team should have the details of these people. Work with your sales team to identify who they are and reach out to them. 

2. Reach out to them for interviews

Once you’ve identified a list of people you’d like to talk to, send them an email and ask them if they’d like to hop on a call with you.

Be honest and transparent. Tell them directly that you’re trying to learn more about your customers and that you’d like to hear about their experience. 

Make sure to state the time commitment upfront so you don’t scare them away. 20-30 minutes should suffice for the interview. 

Also, assure them that it is not a sales call. Especially if you’re interviewing your users or sales prospects, they might be wary that you will use the opportunity to segue into a sales pitch. 

Finally, you can offer an incentive to show appreciation for your customer’s time. It’ll also help encourage take-ups. 

Adrienne Barnes of Best Buyer Persona says that she has found that discounts on your product (especially when talking to your customers) have yielded great success. Alternatively, charitable donations to your customer’s charity of choice (under their name) are also a great incentive idea to try. 

3. Interview them

With the interviews scheduled, it’s time to do the actual interview. 

Before the interview begins, ask if you can record it. This is important because we’re not going to lean on our unreliable memories to try and parse out insights. And while note-taking during the interview is essential, excessive note-taking disrupts the session. 

When your interviewee has signified an “ok,” you can start.

Adele Revella of Buyer Persona Institute suggests that you begin with this question, “Take me back to the day when you first decided to evaluate [the category of solution your product fits into] and tell me what happened.”

This should set the tone and allow your interviewee to relate their experience. 

You can also ask questions based on Adele Revella’s famous Five Rings of Buying Insight:

  1. Priority Initiatives — What’s causing buyers to invest in products like yours? What about buyers who are satisfied with the status quo?
  2. Success Factors — What results does your buyer expect to achieve from buying your (or a similar) product?
  3. Perceived Barriers — What concerns do your buyers have regarding your product? What’s stopping them from buying?
  4. Buyer’s Journey — How do buyers evaluate their options?
  5. Decision Criteria — Which aspects of your competitors do buyers consider the most important? 

From there, follow these tips to ensure a smooth interview:

  • Give interviewees time to respond. Your interviewees are not robots with prepared answers to every question. Silence is golden—give them space and time to think through their thoughts and respond. 
  • Listen. Don’t insert your own opinions or defend yourself or your products. Your goal is to find answers, not sell or be judged by a court of opinion. Make sure to listen to what your customers are saying. 
  • Ask “why” and ask follow-up questions based on what they’ve said (and use the words they’re using). Your interviewees may not answer your questions directly or fully. Or maybe they might need prodding to provide more information. Don’t be afraid to ask follow-up questions and get them to clarify what they’re saying. You want to be on the same page. Even better: use the words they’ve been using so you can build rapport with them and get them to open up more. 
  • Don’t be afraid to guide your interviewees. It is likely that they will not answer chronologically. They might skip ahead and add a flashback to their story. You should feel comfortable slowing down the pace and guiding them back to the part of the conversation you’re interested in. 

4. Organize your data

When the interviews are over, you’d want to get them transcribed. Use a service like Rev.com to turn them into text. 

Next, it’s time to mark up your interview transcripts. You can then read through the transcripts and identify patterns (such as commonly repeated words and phrases) among what your customers are saying.

When you see two or more of the same pattern, create a category for them. The easiest way to create these “categories” is via the marketing funnel.

The Marketing Funnel.The Marketing Funnel.

For example, say we interviewed a few of our customers at Ahrefs. Reading through the transcripts, we noticed that one commonly repeated phrase was “we wanted to figure out how to rank in Google for more keywords related to our business.” Since we sell an SEO toolset, we could easily file that under the category of “Interest.”

You can do all of this in Google Sheets. 

Using Google Sheets to record important data from persona research.Using Google Sheets to record important data from persona research.

An alternative method of marking up the transcript is to follow the Five Rings of Buying Insights.

5. Create your buyer persona(s) by segmenting your data

Finally, you’d want to segment your data into different audiences. 

Here are some ways you can segment your audience, courtesy of Adrienne Barnes:

  1. The “jobs to be done” your customers bought your product for
  2. Pain points
  3. Usage
  4. Company size
  5. Industry

Sometimes there are clearly two different people you can see popping out of your data. Sometimes, there’s clearly just one “job-to-be-done,” so you only have one persona. How you segment and how many segments you should create depends entirely on your business and customers. There’s no perfect way to go about it. 

Once you’ve identified your segments, transfer them into a document(s) with all the relevant qualitative data. 

How to use your buyer persona in your marketing

The goal of creating your buyer persona is to use them in your marketing. Not store them somewhere and forget about them. 

So, here’s how to use buyer personas:

1. Positioning

Positioning consultant April Dunford writes that “positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about.”

You can use the information you’ve gathered to fix or adjust your positioning with what your customers care about.

2. Creating content for the different stages of the buyer’s journey

To create content for the buyer’s journey, you need to know who the buyer is. And you need to know how they progress through each stage until they purchase your product. 

You now have both pieces of information. 

For example, let’s say we’ve created a buyer persona at Ahrefs. We’ll call him Billy Blogger. And here’s Billy Blogger’s journey:

An example buyer's journey.An example buyer's journey.

In the Awareness stage, Billy is struggling with getting more traffic to his site. So, if we’re creating content for this stage, we’re looking for topics related to:

  • Website traffic
  • Blog traffic

Here’s how we can find topics related to this stage to target:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Enter the above terms
  3. Go to the Matching terms report

Since the “Awareness stage” keywords are mostly informational, we’ll switch the toggle to Questions.

Finding keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.Finding keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.

As you can see, there are over 1,600 potential topics we can target. However, since not all of them will be relevant to us, we’ll eyeball the list and pick out relevant ones. 

We can repeat this step to look for topics for the other stages of the buyer’s journey.

Recommended reading: What Is the Buyer’s Journey? How to Create Content for Every Stage

3. Alignment with sales and product teams

With the information from your buyer interviews, you can help your sales team anticipate buying barriers, create relevant marketing and sales materials, and prepare tools and arguments for moving customers towards purchase.

Likewise, it can also help your product teams create products that customers want and remove friction from how they use your product. 

Here are some frequently asked questions about buyer personas. 

1. How many buyer interviews should I do?

To kickstart your process, aim to conduct at least ten interviews. But bear in mind that buyer interviews are not a “campaign.” Ideally, you should be doing this every month—meeting buyers, interviewing them, getting real-life stories and quotes, and updating your buyer persona document (where necessary). 

2. What questions should I ask in the interview?

There’s no fixed set of questions to ask. Most of it should come spontaneously and naturally since there should be follow-up questions based on what your interviewee says. 

Other than that, you should also be constructing questions based on what you want to know. And this depends heavily on your business, product, customers, and the existing information you have.

However, if you really need a set of questions to ask (or at least use as inspiration), I like this list from Mike Fishbein.

3. Should I include demographics and psychographics in my buyer persona?

In the introduction, I poo-pooed the idea of adding these details to your buyer persona. But they’re not all that bad. 

You can add them if they’re actually useful to your marketing. Although there are plenty of times, especially in B2B and software, where this information is not useful.

Think about it: If you’re selling a martech software, does it matter whether ‘Charlie CMO’ is married? If his partner is the CEO or CFO, it does, but that’s an exceptional circumstance. Usually, it won’t impact your marketing.

However, it is useful if you own a wedding photography business. A married person doesn’t need wedding photography services, so demographic information such as marital status would be helpful to such a business. 

4. Can I do surveys instead of calling my customers?

I know. Picking up the phone or hopping onto Zoom calls can be intimidating. But there’s no substitute for actually talking to someone. 

Plus, surveys have to be designed by someone. And that someone can only design a survey based on their existing knowledge. That means a survey can be subjected to the designer’s unintended bias and therefore fail to discover new or unexpected insights. 

Sidenote.

Interview questions can be subject to the interviewer’s unintended bias too. So make sure that you create open-ended questions and leave them to your interviewee to answer in any way they like. Do not insert your opinion or try to guide them to the answer you want to hear. 

You don’t want to conduct multiple surveys and end up only perpetuating your confirmation bias. 

Instead, use surveys to validate the insights you acquired via your interviews. See if the comments given by your interviewees are one-off or representative of a larger audience set.

5. How many buyer personas should I create?

Adele Revella writes:

The fundamental question isn’t how many buyer personas are required, but rather how many ways do you need to market your solution so that you can persuade buyers that your approach is ideally suited to their needs?

We can achieve this goal only if the way we define our buyer personas makes it easy to know when a different version of our story will result in more business for the company.

Adele RevellaAdele Revella

This is the reason why we’re less concerned with demographics but more with the “job-to-be-done.” When you segment by demographics, it’s tempting to create every variation after the sun—after all, there isn’t just Charlie CMO; there’s also Claire CMO, Chantelle CMO, CMO Chen, and so on. 

However, since they are CMOs, they will have similar “jobs-to-be-done.” And if you find that to be true from your interviews, you can create one buyer persona to target them all. But if you find that some expectations are different, then that’s when you can consider creating another buyer persona. 

If you think that creating another buyer persona can help you market your product better—like what Adele Revella says—then consider investing some resources to conduct additional buyer interviews to “prove” that this persona exists. Surveys can work, too—use them to see if your current findings apply across all segments. 

6. Should you interview the “final decision maker” (e.g., CMO, CFO, CEO)?

In many companies, especially large ones, —the final decision maker is a higher-up. And traditionally, many sales teams are taught to target the final decision maker to sell their products.

In that case, should you take cues from the sales team? Probably not. That is because while the “final decision maker” gives the ok to buy, they may not be involved much in the evaluation process. 

If so, interviewing them (if they’re even available in the first place) will not yield much insight. You’re better off interviewing people who are involved. 

Final thoughts

This post would not have been possible without the work of Adele Revella and Adrienne Barnes. If you’d like to explore more of their work, I recommend:

  1. Reading Adele Revella’s book, Buyer Personas
  2. Listening to this podcast episode, where Adrienne Barnes explains how to create buyer personas

Any questions or comments about creating buyer personas? Let me know on Twitter.

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After ‘Unexpected’ Delays

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GPT Store Set To Launch In 2024 After 'Unexpected' Delays

OpenAI shares its plans for the GPT Store, enhancements to GPT Builder tools, privacy improvements, and updates coming to ChatGPT.

  • OpenAI has scheduled the launch of the GPT Store for early next year, aligning with its ongoing commitment to developing advanced AI technologies.
  • The GPT Builder tools have received substantial updates, including a more intuitive configuration interface and improved file handling capabilities.
  • Anticipation builds for upcoming updates to ChatGPT, highlighting OpenAI’s responsiveness to community feedback and dedication to AI innovation.

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

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96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes. 

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?

To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.

How many web pages get organic search traffic?

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.

Distribution of pages by traffic from Content Explorer

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:

  1. ~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
  2. Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.

That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic. 

But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?

Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.

Reason 1: The topic has no search demand

If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.

For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:

The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demandThe top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand

This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:

Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demandKeyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand

This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.

Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.

You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential): 

Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Reason 2: The page has no backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
Pages with more referring domains get more traffic

Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:

Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywordsPages with more referring domains rank for more keywords
Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords

Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?

No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.

The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…

Pages with more referring domains get more trafficPages with more referring domains get more traffic
How much traffic pages with no backlinks get

… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.

For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks: 

Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content ExplorerExample of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks forSome of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

You might have noticed two other things about these pages:

  • Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
  • Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank. 

Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:

  1. Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
  2. Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.

If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:

  1. Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
  4. Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)
Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFiltering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)

To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation. 

Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent

Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages. 

It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"

Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.

It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:

Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinksPage selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks
Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"

Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”

Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga matsNumber of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats

However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.

We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.

It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial: 

Original landing page for our free backlink checkerOriginal landing page for our free backlink checker

After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:

People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away. 

So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since. 

Our rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the pageOur rankings over time for the keyword "backlink checker." You can see when we changed the page

Organic traffic went through the roof, too. From ~14K monthly organic visits pre-optimization to almost ~200K today. 

Estimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checkerEstimated search traffic over time to our free backlink checker

TLDR

96.55% of pages get no organic traffic. 

Keep your pages in the other 3.45% by building backlinks, choosing topics with organic traffic potential, and matching search intent.

Ping me on Twitter if you have any questions. 🙂



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Firefox URL Tracking Removal – Is This A Trend To Watch?

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Firefox URL Tracking Removal - Is This A Trend To Watch?

Firefox recently announced that they are offering users a choice on whether or not to include tracking information from copied URLs, which comes on the on the heels of iOS 17 blocking user tracking via URLs. The momentum of removing tracking information from URLs appears to be gaining speed. Where is this all going and should marketers be concerned?

Is it possible that blocking URL tracking parameters in the name of privacy will become a trend industrywide?

Firefox Announcement

Firefox recently announced that beginning in the Firefox Browser version 120.0, users will be able to select whether or not they want URLs that they copied to contain tracking parameters.

When users select a link to copy and click to raise the contextual menu for it, Firefox is now giving users a choice as to whether to copy the URL with or without the URL tracking parameters that might be attached to the URL.

Screenshot Of Firefox 120 Contextual Menu

Screenshot of Firefox functionality

According to the Firefox 120 announcement:

“Firefox supports a new “Copy Link Without Site Tracking” feature in the context menu which ensures that copied links no longer contain tracking information.”

Browser Trends For Privacy

All browsers, including Google’s Chrome and Chrome variants, are adding new features that make it harder for websites to track users online through referrer information embedded in a URL when a user clicks from one site and leaves through that click to visit another site.

This trend for privacy has been ongoing for many years but it became more noticeable in 2020 when Chrome made changes to how referrer information was sent when users click links to visit other sites. Firefox and Safari followed with similar referrer behavior.

Whether the current Firefox implementation would be disruptive or if the impact is overblown is kind of besides the point.

What is the point is whether or not what Firefox and Apple did to protect privacy is a trend and if that trend will extend to more blocking of URL parameters that are stronger than what Firefox recently implemented.

I asked Kenny Hyder, CEO of online marketing agency Pixel Main, what his thoughts are about the potential disruptive aspect of what Firefox is doing and whether it’s a trend.

Kenny answered:

“It’s not disruptive from Firefox alone, which only has a 3% market share. If other popular browsers follow suit it could begin to be disruptive to a limited degree, but easily solved from a marketers prospective.

If it became more intrusive and they blocked UTM tags, it would take awhile for them all to catch on if you were to circumvent UTM tags by simply tagging things in a series of sub-directories.. ie. site.com/landing/<tag1>/<tag2> etc.

Also, most savvy marketers are already integrating future proof workarounds for these exact scenarios.

A lot can be done with pixel based integrations rather than cookie based or UTM tracking. When set up properly they can actually provide better and more accurate tracking and attribution. Hence the name of my agency, Pixel Main.”

I think most marketers are aware that privacy is the trend. The good ones have already taken steps to keep it from becoming a problem while still respecting user privacy.”

Some URL Parameters Are Already Affected

For those who are on the periphery of what’s going on with browsers and privacy, it may come as a surprise that some tracking parameters are already affected by actions meant to protect user privacy.

Jonathan Cairo, Lead Solutions Engineer at Elevar shared that there is already a limited amount of tracking related information stripped from URLs.

But he also explained that there are limits to how much information can be stripped from URLs because the resulting negative effects would cause important web browsing functionality to fail.

Jonathan explained:

“So far, we’re seeing a selective trend where some URL parameters, like ‘fbclid’ in Safari’s private browsing, are disappearing, while others, such as TikTok’s ‘ttclid’, remain.

UTM parameters are expected to stay since they focus on user segmentation rather than individual tracking, provided they are used as intended.

The idea of completely removing all URL parameters seems improbable, as it would disrupt key functionalities on numerous websites, including banking services and search capabilities.

Such a drastic move could lead users to switch to alternative browsers.

On the other hand, if only some parameters are eliminated, there’s the possibility of marketers exploiting the remaining ones for tracking purposes.

This raises the question of whether companies like Apple will take it upon themselves to prevent such use.

Regardless, even in a scenario where all parameters are lost, there are still alternative ways to convey click IDs and UTM information to websites.”

Brad Redding of Elevar agreed about the disruptive effect from going too far with removing URL tracking information:

“There is still too much basic internet functionality that relies on query parameters, such as logging in, password resets, etc, which are effectively the same as URL parameters in a full URL path.

So we believe the privacy crackdown is going to continue on known trackers by blocking their tracking scripts, cookies generated from them, and their ability to monitor user’s activity through the browser.

As this grows, the reliance on brands to own their first party data collection and bring consent preferences down to a user-level (vs session based) will be critical so they can backfill gaps in conversion data to their advertising partners outside of the browser or device.”

The Future Of Tracking, Privacy And What Marketers Should Expect

Elevar raises good points about how far browsers can go in terms of how much blocking they can do. Their response that it’s down to brands to own their first party data collection and other strategies to accomplish analytics without compromising user privacy.

Given all the laws governing privacy and Internet tracking that have been enacted around the world it looks like privacy will continue to be a trend.

However, at this point it time, the advice is to keep monitoring how far browsers are going but there is no expectation that things will get out of hand.

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