First Party Data
First-party data is becoming one of the most important foundations of modern digital measurement. In this series, we explain what first-party data is, how to collect it responsibly, how to send it securely to advertising platforms, and how to use it to improve attribution, campaign optimization, and lead quality. We cover consent, hashing, server-side tracking, CRM imports, platform-specific setup, and practical debugging so you can turn your own customer data into more reliable marketing signals.
The cookie apocalypse and the many other attempts at coming up with an original name for the end of third-party cookies in Google Chrome thankfully stopped haunting our LinkedIn feeds sometime in early 2024. What it did do, however, was spark an industry-wide conversation about working with first-party data . That is proving to be a key step toward better measurement and stronger campaign performance today.
In the first part of our series on using first-party data in online advertising, we explained why first-party data is important for media targeting and improving campaign performance. In this part, we will take a closer look at how to collect first-party data correctly and send it to media systems. We will go through the full journey of first-party data, from the dataLayer through normalization and hashing to sending it via server-side Google Tag Manager (sGTM) to Google Ads and Meta. The goal is to give you a practical guide that you can implement right away, including code snippets, edge cases, and the places where things most often break in practice.