“This spread of responses is telling,” said Myles Younger, senior director of marketing at MightyHive. “It implies that first-party data is still a work in progress across the board, with an abundance of challenges that marketers have yet to fully overcome.”
Web browsers restricting ad trackers, new data privacy laws and constant data breaches have given marketers incentive to use less third-party data, which they obtain from companies without direct user relationships, in favor of more first-party data collected straight from their customers. But getting the right strategy and technological infrastructure in place to activate first-party data at scale is a struggle for many marketers.
“We’ve found that many organizations have access to technical capabilities but lack the strategy and execution, and even resources, needed to find success with tapping into first-party data,” said Andy Monfried, founder and CEO of data management platform Lotame.
When asked what were the biggest challenges of using first-party data, respondents in MightyHive’s survey cited accuracy, costs and privacy concerns as their top three challenges.
Overcoming these obstacles is key for marketers clamoring for more first-party data. In an April 2018 survey from ad tech firm Sizmek, 85% of brand marketers in the US and 75% of those in Western Europe said that increasing their use of first-party data was a high priority.