Switching From Third Party to First Party Intent Data Using Interactive Demos

The long-awaited death of third-party cookies is finally here.

In early January 2024, Google began testing its new privacy features, restricting third-party cookies in Chrome for 1% of its users — with the intent to ramp up to 100% of users by Q3 2024.

That’s a huge change, and it means marketers must adapt.

Many folks have already made concerted efforts to collect more first-party data. But customer attributes and demographics only tell you so much.

What you really need is first-party intent. And you can get that with interactive demos.

In this post, we’ll explain what intent interactive demo intent data is and how you can use it to optimize your paid and outbound campaigns.

Interactive demos track who engaged with your product demo (through form fills and account enrichment) and how they interacted with it (number of clicks, steps reached).

Combining these two data sets reveals how qualified and familiar with your product an account is, helping marketing teams refine their target audience and share hot leads with sales.

The way you make the switch depends on whether you form gate your demo or not.

If you do form gate, you can create standard lead lists.

If you do not form gate, you can use Navattic’s account identification feature to retarget on the account level instead of the individual contact level.

Take a tour of our account identification feature below:

Below we’ll share how to leverage interactive demo data to retarget warm leads and improve sales outreach — regardless of your gating choice.

For more information on the pros and cons of form gating, check out: Should You Gate or Ungate Your Interactive Demo

Retargeting Ads

Previously, marketers relied on LinkedIn and Google Ad audience segments to create audiences based on demographic data and prospect interests.

But the data itself was a black box. You weren’t 100% sure which companies you were targeting.

With first-party data, you no longer have to guess. You know the companies you're retargeting are actively searching for a solution.

LinkedIn Ads

We use interactive demo data to build LinkedIn retargeting campaigns at Navattic.

Unlike most ABM campaigns that take a quarter to show results, we could measure performance in just 45 days: 11 won deals and 27 qualified opportunities.

Here’s how to achieve similar results:

Review your tech stack. You’ll need an interactive demo platform like Navattic, LinkedIn Ads, and a platform to connect target Navattic accounts to LinkedIn Ads. We sent our target list to LinkedIn via Hubspot, but you can do this with a .csv export.

Sync Navattic accounts to LinkedIn Ads. You can either upload your .csv file or use our native HubSpot integration to map Navattic Account fields to Hubspot Company fields.

• If you go the HubSpot route, create an ad audience list that includes all accounts that viewed your interactive demo. You can find them by filtering by all accounts where “Navattic Identifier” is known.
• Then, add in any other ICP CRM firmographic data you have, like industry, size, and location. Send these audiences directly to LinkedIn through Hubspot.

Pick your creative. We won’t get too prescriptive here, but we noticed in our own experiments that thought leadership-style ads with social proof and concrete metrics tend to work best.

Tweak your approach. Cross-check your results with your LinkedIn Demographic report to make sure your ads are served to the right target accounts and adjust if needed.

See if you can find a pattern with high-performing ads so you can recreate your success. And use new creative — leads shouldn’t see the same content over and over.

For a more in-depth guide to LinkedIn retargeting, check out: Navattic Internal Experiment: Interactive Demo Accounts for LinkedIn Retargeting

Google Ads

Navattic’s integration with GA4 integration allows you to track anonymous interactive demo visitors. Once your two accounts are linked, you can retarget these users by:

Creating a GA4 audience based on whether a user has completed a Navattic event. Use additional filters for custom dimensions if you only want to retarget certain demos:

Sending that audience to Google Ads and using it as a retargeting audience.

1. In your Google Ads account, click Campaigns → “Audiences, keywords, and content.”
2. Click “Audiences.”
3. Head to the “Audiences segment” module, and click “Edit audience segments.”
4. Click “Ad group” and select a campaign and ad group.
5. Select the audience segments you want to reach by clicking the checkbox next to each segment.
6. Click Save.

Pulling the GA4 Navattic Events Audience into Google Ads

1. Head to Audience Manager.
2. Click on the + → Google Analytics.
3. Link your GA4, and your premade audience should be an option to choose from.

SDR outreach

Third party lead lists are typically based on a vague form of intent — like someone looking at a whitepaper once about a topic relating to your software — and, as a result, aren’t high-converting.

Interactive demo data narrows your lead list to prospects who are actually interested in and familiar with your software and have a higher chance of responding to SDR outreach.

If you have demos around different use cases or personas, SDRs can take their outreach a step further, sending prospects another demo that centers around their specific area of interest.

Here’s how to set up your outreach process:

If you have an ungated demo

And your SDRs work out of a CRM

1. Sync account-level information from Navattic with your CRM
2. Filter all accounts where “Navattic Identifier” is known.
3. Create a “top accounts” list of accounts that match your ICP.
4. Assign it to your SDRs to work.

And your SDRs don’t work out of a CRM

1. Export account-level information from Navattic.
2. Remove existing customers or opportunities.
3. Export that list and send it to your SDRs to work or share via our Slack integration.

If you have a gated demo

And your SDRs work out of a CRM

1. Integrate Navattic with Hubspot, Salesforce, or Marketo.
2. Filter all contacts or leads where “Navattic Project” is known.
3. Create a “top lead” list of leads that match your ICP.
4. Assign them to your SDRs to work.

And your SDRs don’t work out of a CRM

1. Export visitor information from Navattic.
2. Remove existing customers or opportunities.
3. Manually assign those accounts to SDRs to work or share via our Slack integration.

For more interactive demo marketing ideas to try, consider reading:

• Email Marketing Strategies for Product Demos
• Ad Best Practices for Product Demos
• How to Personalize Demos for ABM Campaigns