March 2024
Plan Now to Advertise Without Third-Party Cookies in the Future
It’s happening. Google’s promise of removing third-party cookies is underway, which is causing mixed reactions from users and marketers.
Third-party cookies are unique text files placed on a user’s browser, tracking user activity across websites. This makes advertising more targeted and thus more relevant. But many internet users are concerned about what information is collected and how it’s being used. For marketers, the loss of cookie data could make it more difficult to target relevant consumers.
Firefox, Safari and other browsers began removing third-party cookie capabilities over a decade ago, in 2013. By 2019 and 2020, these browsers were blocking cookies by default. But because Google Chrome accounts for 63.6 percent of internet users worldwide*, the largest impact on both marketers and users was yet to come.
(*reference source: https://www.statista.com/chart/30734/browser-market-share-by-region/)
In the first days of 2024, Google began cookie deprecation by removing third-party cookies from one percent of its global Chrome users, translating to 30 million users. However, it’s unlikely marketers will feel much immediate impact as Google plans to complete the transition by year-end.
To minimize the impact to marketers, Google and other platforms have been preparing for a cookie-less environment in advance. With the improvements and advancements in AI and other technologies, Google has expedited this preparation, which should soften the impact of cookie deprecation while still maintaining user privacy.
Analytics platforms, including Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics and others, should be updated to manage your audience strategy. This includes ensuring all available advertising platforms have secure connections to your analytics platform. From there, you can create custom views in your analytics platforms for performance evaluation, across platforms. Additionally, you can build and test different audiences from your first-party data that may be utilized across advertising platforms.
In the immediate term, digital paid media performance should experience little to no impact. But to avoid blind spots that may become more apparent as cookie deprecation progresses, be sure all advertising platforms have the more recent conversion tracking set up.
Platforms like Google Ads and Meta have updated conversion-tracking tags for the cookie-less future. If you haven’t updated these, you could be missing out on valuable performance data.
The loss of cookies hits hardest when it comes to precision audience targeting. By third-party cookies following users’ interactions across websites, it provides valuable data and insights for more precise audience-targeting. Fortunately, most advertising platforms can leverage other data sources and signals, with better data privacy, to build audiences without cookie data. However, these audiences will be broader.
First-party data is collected directly from users via your website, apps or other digital properties used by customers and prospects. This is the most accurate data about your current and would-be customers. A great use of this first-party data is to build cohorts of audiences that should be used in advertising platforms.
Plan now to advertise successfully in the future
All is not lost. Far from it. Brands that plan and invest proactively will be more trusted for respecting consumer privacy while developing, testing and deploying new and inventive ways to reach their audiences with the targeted and relevant messages that made cookies so valuable in the first place.
To learn more about how third-party cookie deprecation will impact your online marketing and advertising efforts (and what you can do about it), contact us – we’re ready to help!
