Third-party cookies are a powerful tool for online marketers. Fortunately or unfortunately, they are being phased out – mostly due to online privacy concerns. Safari and Firefox have already phased out third-party cookies and Google’s Chrome browser is set to do the same in 2023.
Before you get too worried, Google and others already have replacement solutions to track people online and target ads to relevant groups. Online tracking isn’t going away, it's just changing.
Third-party cookies are placed by and stored under a different domain than the one you are visiting. The domains that are storing your data—the ones you did not give your information to—have been aggregating and licensing your data. For some people this really isn’t an issue. However for others like some of the people interviewed for John Oliver’s April 11th, 2022 highlight on Data Brokers, having their private data available for public purchase could present harm.
One would think that the soon-to-be disappearance of third-party cookies would have advertisers rushing to find alternative strategies. But here’s the weird thing – Adform and Dynata have found that 78% of marketers globally have no tested solution [to replace third-party cookies] in place for 2022. To add, only 3 in 10 (29%) companies globally currently have a first-party ID solution, this figure rises to 4 in 10 (40%) for the US.
On the whole, while digital advertisers are fully aware that their main strategies are nearing their expiration date, they are not running to find a replacement. But should they be? Google and others are already working on replacement solutions.
Of course we should race to utilize whatever tools Emperor Google gifts us with. But shouldn’t we also, maybe, take an opportunity to not be as reliant on our gracious overseer?
This might be a stupid, naïve question but— were third-party cookies really that great or were they just the best option available? Before Google tells us what our next best option is, shouldn't we take the opportunity to reevaluate and make a decision for ourselves?
Are digital marketing agencies leaving too much in the hands of their beloved advertising platforms thereby missing a huge opportunity? Are we falling victim to a less gruesome version of the bystander effect? I can’t help but to wonder if we should intervene.
Do better ways exist to gain the attention we are seeking?
I don’t have any answers but here are some tracking and targeting options as the future gets closer:
First-party cookies + permanent user identifiers (i.e. Email, phone number, user ID)
First Party Data (1P data)
Contextual Targeting or Semantic Targeting
Data Pools
Data Clean Rooms
User Identity Graphs
Digital Fingerprinting
Google’s Publisher Provided Identifiers (PPIDs)
Google will still track users through data collected from its services such as Maps, Search, or YouTube. Only ad tools and unique identifiers for websites will be affected until a replacement tracking system is inevitably implemented.
Users on mobile devices can and will still be tracked and targeted. Google will still target ads to users based on their behavior on its platforms.
Interest-based targeting through Google Topics will group individuals together based on interest. This targeting will not have the capability for frequency capping, target based on browsing behavior or conversion attribution and therefore currently does not replace cookies.
The more content that Google itself has, the more that Google, and others like Google, can gather and store user data in the form of first-party cookies. The moral of the story being that Google will only continue to become a more valuable advertising partner.
https://snigel.com/blog/best-third-party-cookie-alternatives
https://snigel.com/blog/what-is-googles-privacy-sandbox
https://www.match2one.com/blog/how-removal-of-third-party-cookies-affects-digital-marketers/
https://cookie-script.com/all-you-need-to-know-about-third-party-cookies.html
https://signal.co/resources/first-party-data/
https://www.criteo.com/blog/contextual-vs-behavioral-targeting/
https://www.richpanel.com/blog/what-is-an-identity-graph
Will the end of cookies be the end of internet tracking? | Popular Science (popsci.com)
The Cookieless Future: Why Are Cookies Going Away? (g2.com)
https://www.richpanel.com/blog/what-is-an-identity-graph
https://clearcode.cc/blog/online-privacy-user-data/
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