As third-party cookies disappear, marketers face both a challenge and an opportunity: to build direct, trusted relationships with users through unified first-party data.

This week’s article explores how to collect, unify and act on first-party data to grow revenue — and why ethical, transparent practices are crucial for digital success.

Step 1: Offer value

To make users want to share their first‑party data, you must earn their trust. According to a recent Forbes article, 94% of consumers would be more loyal to brands that practice transparency, while 56% claim that brand transparency would make them "loyal for life." (Barreto, 2024). Create tangible value for them — relevant content, seamless experiences, exclusive access, and personalized offers.

Publishers, financial institutions, and digital brands are using Piano’s products to design these exchanges contextually: prompting registration and buying when users are most engaged and rewarding transparency with better service.

Step 2: Structure and unify your data

Most brands don’t lack data; they lack structure. Behavioral events sit in analytics, subscription details live in CRMs, and campaign metrics are stranded in ad‑tech tools. By unifying this information, you move away from isolated signals to insights you can act on.

With Piano, everything about your users is stored in one place – who they are, how they engage, what content converts them, and where friction occurs. This allows you to adjust your strategy and create personalized user journeys that improve engagement and revenue.

Step 3: Apply insights

Once your data is structured, you can act on it. There are many things you can do with Piano, including:

• Dynamic Paywalling: Experiment with how much access each user gets based on their engagement or likelihood to convert and optimize both ad revenue and subscription data simultaneously. Using Piano’s dynamic paywall, The Post and Courier achieved a 57% paywall revenue growth period-over-period.

• Retention Campaigns: Identify at‑risk subscribers and give personalized reminders and offers before they churn.

• Lifecycle Monetization: Use behavioral cues such as clicks to move users from anonymous readers to registered users, to subscribers, and to advocates. With Piano, you can also capture profile attributes such as age and interests, purchase details (for example, color and brand), and contextual information such as weather at the time of action.

• Contextual Campaign Targeting: Create personalized offers based on your user’s demonstrated interests, not their third‑party lookalikes.

The Bottom Line

Using behavioral intelligence can help increase conversions, average revenue per user, and customer lifetime value.

The more you create experiences rooted in deeply understanding your audience — the better you can drive engagement and conversion. By investing in unified first‑party data today, you’re creating the foundation for more meaningful, profitable relationships with every user tomorrow.

Learn more on how to collect and unify your data with our free, on-demand webinar here.