After observing the evolving landscape of ecommerce and digital marketing over the last few months, I've come to the conclusion that there will be a day of reckoning for snake oil agencies and freelancers.
For instance - Google announced plans to phase out support for third-party cookies in its Chrome browser by late 2024. This has been dubbed the "cookie apocalypse".
Third-party cookies have been a crucial tool for advertisers and marketers to track users across different websites, gather data on their online activities, and serve targeted ads based on their browsing history and interests.
With the deprecation of third-party cookies, traditional methods of tracking users, building audience profiles, and attributing conversions to specific ad campaigns will become much more difficult.
I've heard conversations where ROAS (return on ad spend) will soon mean nothing. This has been one metric that ad agencies promote and focus on to win and keep business.
The thing is - unless you have a whole ton of money to throw at ads, and are assuming there's business and brand building activity happening off channels - your ads might not be as effective. Especially if you're trying to break into new audiences.
What I'm trying to say is this - you will need to actually be good at business and marketing. The barrier to entry to work with Shopify brands is going to be higher - even more so for Shopify Plus brands. Businesses are cutting costs everywhere and scrutinizing every dollar spent.
An overnight agency who outsources to cheap labour overseas is going to have a very hard time. Business are not going to be that impressed with you anymore unless you have a really strong position, skillset, and value proposition.
Bg changes ahead, but ultimately, I think it's good.
- Consumers will have better offerings and be spammed and scammed less.
- Businesses will become more competitive and really have to focus on having a good product.
- The value of an expert opinion in digital marketing will mean more, since you will need to actually be knowledgable, resourceful and have solid skills.
- It will be easier to figure out who is really full of it and who can really deliver results.
