1PD Ops Strategy…. This is what we’re going to discuss but why? The clock is ticking, and the marketing landscape is changing faster than ever. 2024 delivered some hard truths to eCommerce performance marketers: third-party cookies are dead (across all browsers), privacy regulations are tightening (GDPR, CCPA, India’s DPDPA, and more), users are becoming more aware of data privacy & consent, and Ad platforms changing.
All of these resulted in the old ways of targeting losing effectiveness. If you’re still relying on outdated methods, you’re driving with your eyes closed.
It’s the time you wake up! There’s a clear path forward. In 2025, the power of your own customer data—first-party data (1PD)—will be the key to unprecedented marketing success. But merely collecting that data won’t cut it. You need a robust strategy to manage and activate it. That’s where 1PD Ops comes into play, becoming your secret weapon for a successful 2025 and beyond to help you with first-party data strategies.
The World’s 1st 1PD Ops Performance Marketing Summit that happened in India on 21st March 2025 was all about these strategies. For all those who missed, and also for those who attended, here’s a blog that talks about 1PD Ops Strategies, why you need it, and how you can leverage them for making your Marketing Campaigns successful!
Why 1PD Ops is needed in 2025 & Beyond?
AI-powered marketing demands high-quality, robust 1PD to deliver peak performance. To effectively train these models and reach their potential, you, as a performance marketer, need a constant flow of quality 1PD.
Top advertising platforms are shifting their models to prioritize 1PD (first-party data). As Mark Zuckerberg highlighted in Meta’s Q2 2024 earnings call, their AI advertising models will heavily rely on 1PD signals in the long run to help Businesses transform their goals into Marketing Objectives and achieve them.
This shift isn’t just about Meta; it’s a wider trend. Google also has been emphasizing on the same for quite sometime now. The recent report by Shopify – “Seeing Around Corners: Personalization“, speaks about the same –
In short, the future of efficient ad spend and ROI is in building and leveraging your own 1PD infrastructure. And it goes deeper than basic data collection – it requires a first-party data strategy to turn it into value.
Understanding 1PD Ops: Beyond Conversion Tracking To Activate First Party Data
Collecting data and tracking it in the ad platforms is the first step. But it’s the operations around it, that are pivotal. 1PD Ops is the strategic and operational framework that empowers you to maximize the value of your first-party data. It’s not just about gathering information; it’s about building
- a unified customer view,
- storing 1P data with updated consent signals in real-time,
- stitching the customer journey across their multiple touchpoints & sources,
- in-depth analysis of the 1P data (1PD Analytics) to understand the user behavior better, and aligning your marketing & business goals,
- segmenting the users based on their behavior (for marketing strategies),
- tracking custom events to measure the business goals at the campaign level,
- activating that data across all marketing channels, and
- constantly optimizing your campaigns based on real-time insights & to meet your business goals.
Think of it as your central nervous system for data-driven marketing. A system that powers the ad algorithms with high-quality data signals to drive the results that matter to your business using 1PD Ops strategy.
To implement this in Meta Ads, you need to implement an advanced Conversions API; and for Google Ads, you need a robust server-side conversion tracking.
Let’s discuss each step and the key components in 1PD Ops strategy. [You can also go through the Ultimate Guide to 1PD Ops for more details.]
Here are the key components:
Understand the Business Objective:
Most performance marketers miss this as a part of the 1P data Ops strategy. Having the business objective clear, and curating the data as per the need to meet this business objective is most crucial that determines the entire success of the 1PD Ops strategy. (The business goal ($$$$) is what matters!) 💰
So, the business objective can be
- Profitability
- Revenue
- Incremental Revenue
- More sales, or
- Brand name – the reach
Once you understand the business objective, as a part of the 1PD Ops strategy, you can definitely transform it into your marketing strategy. That’s what Google has been telling as part of the 1PD Activation Playbook. Here’s a screenshot for the same:
Data Collection:
Aggregating data from all your customer touchpoints & sources: your website, in-store (offline store), mobile app, CRM, email campaigns, social media engagements, and more. (Think of all those precious interactions you already have with your customers)
Data Unification & Identity Resolution:
Consolidate the fragmented customer data spread across multiple sources/touchpoints into a single, holistic view of each customer. (It’s all about that “single source of truth”.).
This helps with merging the customer data from multiple places to get a 360-degree view. Accurately identify and merge customer profiles across all these different data sources (no more duplicate records!) to get a complete picture of the customer journey.
In addition to this, one of the best practices is to collect all the external IDs, & other user identifiers (parameters such as fbc, fbp, gclid, etc.,), and append them to the customer’s profile.
First Party Data (1PD) Analysis:
Analysis of the first-party data is crucial to understand the performance of each campaign – the last-click, first-click attribution and all. Plus, it’s not just the ad campaign performance you must track – Go beyond that! For example, using your own 1P data, you can analyze the pipeline value generated through your SEO efforts. Or, you can go ahead and analyze the first-click, last-click attribution.
In addition to this, the 1PD Analytics gives a detailed analysis that helps strategize future campaigns such as audience segmentation strategies. However, the true results of the 1P data can be realized only with true data activation.
1P Data Activation:
One of the major difficulties in truly activating the first-party data is, the businesses think they are already using 1PD (by setting up server-side conversion tracking) and activating it. However, the true power of 1PD Ops can be leveraged by activating the first-party data effectively. Server-side 1P domain tracking alone doesn’t kill it.
One must start collecting first-party data along with consent parameters from across multiple sources, store it and process it as per the business needs, and then activate the known & anonymous website visitors with highest match rates across ad platforms. In addition to this, one must also activate known users through email marketing & WhatsApp marketing.
While activating, the key to remember is, – using hyper-personalized experience to your users. For this, you must come up with strategies by analyzing the data, segmenting the audience, and then crafting the messages & experience accordingly for them.
One such example would be – optimizing for custom conversion events, and also having these in the custom reporting inside Meta Ads like below.
This will help you measure your marketing campaigns accurately, plan optimization strategies, and eventually boost revenue.
Privacy Compliance:
The most crucial part of 1PD Ops is – ensuring customer privacy while adhering to relevant regulations like GDPR and CCPA while collecting data, and activating it across platforms. (Building trust is paramount).
For this, you need to adapt a robust HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, and other data privacy laws compliant systems that power your marketing strategies with consented first-party data. This helps you offer personalized experience to your customers, while respecting their privacy.
How 1PD Ops will power your marketing strategies to activate 1P data?
Implementing 1PD Ops isn’t just a trend; it’s a game-changer. Here’s what it will do for transforming your business goals into marketing strategies:
Data-Driven Decision Making
1PD Ops gives you a clear, complete picture of your customer journey, enabling data-driven decisions in all aspects of your marketing. In addition to this, it will help you gain insights from your customer data. All you have to do is, understand that data with respect to the business goals, and then strategize the next steps.
Some of the next steps after 1PD Analysis can include
- Audience Segmentation based on their behavior to meet the business goals. For example, if your goal is to increase profit, you segment the high AOV audience, and strategize messaging for them.
- Custom event optimization. If your business goal is to clear your dead inventory, understand your first-party data, then track the custom event as the purchase of the product which is a part of your dead inventory, and then optimize the ad campaign for this event with that product creative as the ad.
- Full funnel tracking and activation. If you see more leads being stuck in one particular stage before getting converted, you can segment those audiences, and run an ad or email or WhatsApp campaigns for those audiences to push them to the next stage.
This means better planning, targeted content, and optimized marketing budgets.
Future-Proof Your Strategy
1PD Ops is not a one-time project; it’s an ongoing process that provides the flexibility you need to stay ahead of the curve and adapt to future changes. Plus, it gives you the data in every format you need, and everywhere you need.
For example, if you want to run some ML or MMM modeling on your data, you can easily push your complex customer journey without gaps into the Machine Learning algorithms. As this data is as accurate as possible, it helps you with easy analysis of your data. You can come up with trends, predictive values such as predictive LTV (lifetime value), predictive profit, or revenue.
You can also push your 1P data into LookerStudio or BigQuery, and get the analysis that you want. So, there’s no limitations you will have with 1PD Ops.
You can even automate your email campaigns or WhatsApp messages (through WhatsApp conversational API) once you integrate your data in real-time using 1PD Ops.
All you have to do is, just use it the right way, analyze, get the insights, strategize and activate by training the ad algorithms or by pushing this data into the required platforms.
When all this happens in real-time with complete automation, and optimization is when you can run a sustainable business.
Enhanced Customer Segmentation
1PD Ops enables you to create granular, highly targeted customer segments based on deep insights. Behaviors, preferences, or lifetime value, you decide and segment. For instance, Swiggy, a food delivery app in India saw a 42% increase in gross merchandise volume (GMV) and a 3.5X increase in sweet orders by segmenting their customers and targeting by understanding their customer preferences (they might have probably used the 1P data operations in it 😉).
You can even go with advanced custom conversion event optimization in Meta Ads to implement the strategies of your own.
Hyper-Personalized Customer Experiences
With the aid of AI, you’ll be able to personalize customer experiences at an unprecedented level. 1PD Ops will be the foundation for these hyper-personalized experiences, ensuring you’re serving up content and discount offers that truly resonate.
Think about Rare Rabbit, an apparel brand that saw a more than 200% increase in click-through rates (CTR) by understanding their 1P data and personalizing recommendations to people.
Improved Ad Performance
In 2025, ad platforms are already heavily rely on 1P data signals. By leveraging 1PD Ops, you’ll be able to create highly accurate custom audiences, resulting in significant improvements in ad match rates and overall performance.
Ditching old methods, like the Shopify CAPI, in favor of robust 1PD and synthetic events can dramatically reduce your cost per acquisition (CAC) and increase return on ad spend (ROAS). For example, CustomerLabs 1PD Ops has seen case studies showing a 45% reduction in CAC and a 37% increase in ROAS for one campaign. (Imagine what that can do for your bottom line!)
Shaping the future of 1PD Ops: Activate First Party Data
The world of 1PD Ops is constantly evolving. It all started with a customer relationship management software (CRMs), then came the Data management platforms (DMPs), and finally entered the Customer data platforms (CDPs). That’s on the tech side.
However, on emphasizing the importance of first-party data, it was in 2019, around the times when Apple brought in the iOS14 update, everyone started speaking about it but the awareness was too low. It was Deloitte, and CustomerLabs in 2019 who were speaking out loud about 1P data. Deloitte has released a digital data maturity curve.
Then in 2020, BCG and Google started releasing reports on first-party data and its importance but not directly.
Fast forward to 2023, 2024, the space of awareness got crowded by Meta, Shopify, CustomerLabs, Deloitte, and too many other organizations and people.
Finally, in 2024, CustomerLabs has launched the 1PD Ops through an amazing guide – the ultimate guide to 1PD Ops.
However, on the tech side, mostly in the MarTech industry, amidst all the buzz around the CDPs – Composable, lakehouse CDP, data CDP, analytics CDP, performance CDP, orchestration CDP, identity and engagement CDP, and more have popped up. Leading to only more confusion.
Here are the key trends to watch:
Composable CDPs to stay?
Businesses are moving toward flexible, best-of-breed solutions (Composable CDPs) that seamlessly integrate with their tech stacks (ditching traditional monolithic platforms). Below is an image from The Martech Weekly, where they have shown how categorization in the CDP industry is a mess. It is because every single software calls themselves as a CDP, making the basic definition redundant.
AI-Powered Automation
Expect AI and machine learning to play a growing role, automating and optimizing 1PD Ops, freeing up your time for strategic initiatives. This automation with AI-powered insights are to drive the businesses beyond imagination. For instance, Meta’s CEO, Zuckerberg, has mentioned that – “all that businesses have to do is tell their objective, and we will get them that.”
Bur for that to happen, it is crucial to power these AI-driven algorithms with high-quality first-party data signals (thanks to data privacy technologies).
Data Collaboration & Partnerships
New opportunities will emerge to collaborate with partners and share data in a privacy-compliant manner, enriching insights and activations. This may result in many acquisitions and mergers. In addition to this, we will also see many new emerging technologies that comply with the new data privacy laws (will talk in the coming section).
Data Quality matters more than ever
As we were discussing in the AI-powered automation, with AI models relying on accurate data, the focus on data quality will intensify. Investing in data quality will be a crucial part of 1PD Ops. Because of the recent happenings in the marketing industry, businesses face difficulty in collecting high-quality first-party data signals. Some are struggling even today to properly establish the basic conversion tracking. Now, it’s not just conversion tracking that you would need but a robust first-party mode.
Data Privacy to rise
Privacy considerations will be at the forefront, focusing on building customer trust via privacy-preserving practices. Therefore, it becomes even more necessary to adopt consented first-party data for driving your marketing success. More stringent data privacy laws are to kick-in in 2025. So, ensure to be prepared by adapting consent managers, and other relevant technology that would keep you prepared.
Conclusion: Don’t Get Left Behind
The writing is on the wall: 1PD Ops is the essential ingredient for marketing success in 2025 and beyond. If you’re ready to take charge of your data and deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences that drive results, then now is the time to invest. Don’t get left behind and do not be confused with all those tech in the market; embrace the power of 1PD Ops through robust strategies.
Are you ready to transform your marketing strategy with 1PD Ops? Schedule a Demo with our experts to own the tech!
