In a surprising announcement, Google now says the third-party cookie isn’t crumbling from Chrome browsers after all. Many advertisers breathed a sigh of relief. But before you start celebrating, let’s look at what this looks like in reality, and why you shouldn’t abandon your first-party data plans.
Catching Up on the Crumbling Cookie
- Google originally announced they would end Chrome browser support for third-party tracking cookies back in 2000, with a 2022 cut-off date. We’ve seen three extensions on the original 2022 deadline, with the latest just a few months ago in April.
- Over the years, Google took multiple paths toward replacing cookies, but none of those methods gained widespread adoption in the ad industry or regulatory approval.
- Following the initial announcement, the AdTech industry scrambled to adapt ahead of the original deadline (and subsequent revisions), developing and implementing alternative methods (“Universal IDs”) that rely on hashed email and phone number data, in an attempt to achieve similar targeting and reporting results as the longstanding cookie-fed processes.
- The Trade Desk’s UID 2.0 emerged as a widely accepted alternative for privacy-focused advertising across the “open web,” which is the internet outside of the “walled gardens” of Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc.
- Marketers prioritized first-party data collection to learn as much as they could about their customers and develop a data set that would work within the new frameworks, both inside and outside of those walled gardens. CDPs, identity graphs and data clean rooms became key components in core retention and acquisition strategies.
The New Google Plan
Google’s current plan is to maintain support of third-party cookies, but give users the choice to allow or disallow tracking themselves, at any time:
“Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time,” Privacy Sandbox VP Anthony Chavez wrote in the announcement blog post.
If this setup sounds familiar, it’s similar to what Apple did back in April, 2021, when iOS 14.5 privacy options gave iPhone users the option to prevent advertisers from using their device IDs for targeting.
By August of that year, some advertisers saw their addressable iPhone audiences drop by 10-30%. That October, AppsFlyer reported only 38% of users opting-in to device tracking for ads, with 62% opting-out.
Using Apple as an example, if Chrome users were to be prompted with an opt-in or opt-out message, it’s likely that there will be even fewer live cookies over time.
Our Advice: Stay the Course with Your First-Party Data
From Google to Apple, across browsers, and on computers to mobile devices and beyond, what we’ve witnessed is an overall degradation of signals from digital audiences.
Even while cookies were still in play, segmentation and targeting became more challenging than ever, channel and ad type preferences shifted within the media mix, and analytics reports evolved to look different today than they did four years ago. What’s more:
- Privacy regulations are continuing to change state-to-state, at the federal level, and worldwide. Even though Google’s keeping the third-party cookie, there are a lot of influential external forces that will likely render it less and less reliable and useful in the future.
- User behavior has fundamentally changed and become more privacy-focused. A May, 2023, Pew Research Center survey reported that 67 percent of US adults turn off cookies or website tracking to protect their privacy. That’s right – around 70 percent of the U.S. internet doesn’t have an active third-party cookie anyway.
Summing Up, Here’s Your Action Plan
With all those forces acting on digital advertising, it’s vitally important to take steps to future-proof your strategy. Here’s what your action plan should be in light of this cookie news:
- Continue collecting permissions-based data about your customers. Learn as much as you can about them so you can market to them in a way that resonates. The more data you own moving forward, the better you will be able to adapt as the advertising landscape changes.
- Bring all that data together, scrub it, and enrich it so it’s usable. A CDP connects your disparate systems and pulls all your data in to one place so you can activate it across channels. A truly useful and good CDP will clean that data for you, eliminating duplicate records, filling in the blanks with identity resolution, and making it actionable. The cleaner your data is going into your custom audience campaigns, the better your results and your return on ad spend (ROAS).
- Don’t put all your eggs in one walled garden basket. It’s true that campaigns in the walled gardens can give you great match rates and help you attract lookalike audiences. But U.S. internet users spend 66 percent of their time online out on the open web, outside of those walled gardens. Make sure your media mix is balanced so you’re not ignoring potential customers, and work with partners that can help you reach custom audiences across the web.
It sure felt like a bombshell announcement, but when you consider all the factors, what we’re left with is a future that honestly, for the time being at least, looks a lot like today. We’re not rewinding the clock and going back to the heyday of behavioral targeting using cookies. Keep moving forward with your first-party data plan, and you’ll be well-prepared to adjust to future industry changes.
