Sojern's Cookieless FAQs

Sojern has pioneered a 3 pillar framework to navigate this cookieless world, which consists of:

• Hashed emails: These are captured through the code (known as a ‘pixel’) we’ll place on your website. When users log-in to your website, or complete a booking with their email, the pixel automatically captures that email and converts it into an unrecognisable jumble of characters (known as a ‘hashed email’) before sending it back to our servers. Alternatively, we can hash and ingest the emails that you have in your CRM too.
• 1st party cookie IDs: These are also captured via pixel. Once the user logs in to your website, or completes a booking, Sojern will be able to associate their hashed email with a 1st party cookie ID. This then lets us anonymously identify that user the next time they visit your website without them having to login again.
• Historical booking data: This refers to the offline sales data (e.g. call-centre, travel agent, walk-ins) that you have lying around in your CRM. We’ll ingest this data directly into the Sojern platform and use it to enhance your campaign performance.

In the cookieless world, travel intent data will still come from our large pool of data partners and Sojern traveler profiles – although in the future, it will be facilitated through the collection of hashed email, first party cookie IDs and historical booking data ingestion. In addition to this, our upper-funnel prospecting tactics to identify your best customers will be supercharged through our machine-learning lookalike audiences and cohort solutions.

Come 2024, you are going to need reliable solutions that can help you navigate this cookieless world. Because Sojern has remained exclusively focused on the travel space for over a decade, we’ve amassed in excess of 350 million traveler profiles, not to mention 1000’s of data partners who provide us with travel intent signals.

When you combine that with our ready-to-go cookieless technology and our strict adherence to global data privacy regulations, you’ll find that Sojern is uniquely positioned to help travel advertisers ensure the continuity of their high-performing, multi-channel campaigns to in-market travelers the moment Google flips that cookieless switch.

Display, Native, Video, CTV, Facebook & Instagram, Metasearch and SEM. Essentially all logged in environments.

Retargeting in a cookieless world will be made possible with hashed emails through two different methods:

‍Site retargeting: When a user visits your site, our pixel (a string of code embedded into the back-end of your site) will capture the first party cookie your website has placed on their browser. Then, when that user either logs in, or completes a purchase, that same pixel will hash and capture their email before associating it with their 1st party cookie ID. This will allow us to anonymously identify that user and track their on-site actions the next time they visit, without them ever having to login again. With their hashed email, we’ll be able to target them wherever they’re logged in online (e.g. website, social media, apps, etc.) and when we influence them to return, the 1st party cookie ID will allow us report on it.

‍CRM retargeting: This involves hashing and ingesting the email addresses you already have in your CRM and using them in the same way as site retargeting. Because you may experience a dip while waiting to collect hashed emails and get them associated to a 1st party cookie ID, CRM retargeting is the perfect solution to help you fill that gap.

A hashed email serves as a “digital passport”, or main identifier of a user. Hashed emails let us associate all other data points together into a Sojern Traveler Profile and we use that to deliver hyper-targeted ads. The main goal of capturing hashed emails and 1st party cookie IDs is to associate them together. This lets us track all current and future user activity on your site, and retarget that user, without them ever having to login again after the initial hashed email capture.

Without associating both together, direct booking strategies won’t reach their full potential as it would require the user to login to your website each and every time in order for us to capture their activity, something which isn't likely to happen that often.

We’ll collect and ingest your historical booking data directly from your CRM. The process is very straight forward – you just need to review the document we’ll send you, then select the data parameters that are available for you to share with us. We’ll then work with you, or your developers, to build a script that automatically pulls in the data we’re requesting from that document. We’ll also provide you, or your developers, with a GCS, S3 or SFTP bucket where you can send that data to us on a regular cadence. Sojern will then ingest this data into our Sojern Traveler Platform and activate it for audience building and insights.

Sojern can collect a wide variety of offline and non-website booking data to build and enrich our traveler profiles which will be used to identify travel intent. For this to work, we require that all historical booking data shared with us also has a corresponding hashed email associated with it so that we can tie all the data together and use it to target the user. We do not use personally identifiable information (PII) such as name, address, social security number, or phone number. Sojern can ingest:

‍Hotel: Hashed email, # of adults & children, Travel purpose
‍Traveler: Check in & out date, # of nights, Country
‍Attraction: Start & end data, City, Category
‍Airlines: Departure date, Origin City, Destination City
‍Cruise: Departure / Arrival Date, Departure Arrival City, Cruise Ship Name