🍐 #50: Cookieless marketing, developer portal navbar, and donation as swag

Hey,

Your favorite pear newsletter just turned 50 (issues). Happy pearthday 🍐 !

This week on the agenda:

• The world with no (advertising) cookies

• Great developer portal navbar design

• What if your swag was a donation?

• + a few bonus links at the end

Let’s go!

Developer marketing insights

1. The world with no (advertising) cookies

There are companies that talk. There are companies that do.

And then there are some who do and then write about it. Sentry is one of these.

Amazing article, here are my takeaways:

• Third-party cookies will be deprecated by Google this year (most likely) -> prepare

• Attribution and reporting will get harder different: you need to rely more on self-reported attribution, UTMS, referrer and landing page segments (this is a great additional reading on this btw)

• Remarketing changes from cookie-based to engagement-based 

• Classic display remarketing may die (for you) completely

• Engagement retargeting may deliver better results as you optimize on platform-specific engagement metrics

• No info about conversion events sent to ad platforms means CPC will likely go up…

• Unless you switch to optimizing on platform-focused engagement metrics like cost per view for YouTube. Then you may actually end up getting better CPC

• You may need to migrate your budget to publishers (newsletters, podcasts, blogs) who create great content for your audience (but this is great actually)

Also after reading this article and talking to Dawid who runs our paid program, we concluded that the team at Sentry really knows their stuff.

But the main takeaway for me is this:

Also, I shared it on HackerNews and got 186 comments from the devs:

• There are a ton of technicalities around how cookies work and how to disable them

• The reported sentiment around ads (and blocking them), user tracking, and privacy is as strong as ever

• Some devs hate Google Tag Manager too (and don’t seem to know what folks use it for)

This comment made me chuckle. HN crowd never fails ;)

As block_dagger c pointed out this article was “long and packed with marketing crap”. Technical, detailed, and incredibly insightful marketing crap I may add.

So I suggest you go and read the whole thing ->

2. Great developer portal navbar design from Auth0

Navbar is a hugely important conversion lever on the dev-facing website. I saw it move the needle by x times in some cases/conversion events.

So, what does a good one look like?

Auth0 did a great job on their developer portal. But the learnings can be applied to your marketing website too.

What I like:

• They have an explicit division between docs and resources (you can do without it but I like it)

• Community (with all the events, forums, support etc) is clearly emphasized and discoverable

• When you click on the navbar tab you get an extensive mega menu with many options

• Each item in the mega menu gets a one-sentence description of what you'll find there

That makes it easy for devs to explore. Without having to click out to see what each tab/item means. And when devs know what you mean they are more likely to actually click out. And convert.

See more dev tool navbar examples ->

3. What if your next swag was a donation?

What if your next swag was a donation? That's what Cockroach Labs did.

Ok, so the typical way of doing swag at a conference is to give out t-shirts for badge scans.

And then folks either wear them or throw them away (or keep wearing them when they should have thrown them away but that is another story).

After the conference you take leftovers with you, ship them home or, you guessed it, throw them away.

A lot of throwing away for a badge scan if you ask me.

Cockroach Labs decided to do something completely different.

They donate a few $ to a great charity @Women Who Code for every badge scan they get.
I love it.

An extra benefit (and where the idea originated) is that with this, you can do virtual badge scans too.

See more dev tool swag examples ->

Need more developer marketing insights?

1. Work with me

• I have a few slots every week for 60-min strategy sessions and longer-term advising. We can talk strategy, tactics, brainstorming, whatever you need right now. See how it works -> 

• You can also promote your product/service/job in this newsletter. But I want to 100% make sure this will add value for the readers so… Let’s talk first ->

2. Join our Slack community

1300+ dev tool CMOs, heads of growth, product marketers, and other practitioners talking about things like this:

Check out marketingto.dev ->

3. Bonus links to check out

• 📜 GitHub - fmerian/awesome-developer-first-channels: hand-picked places to promote your developer-first product

• 📽️ We turned developers into journalists 

• 🍊 Ask HN: What other news feeds do you read besides Hacker News? | Hacker News