Over the past decade, data collection has turned into an industry where data brokers use third-party cookies to track users across the internet. That data is then sold to companies to offer personalized shopping experiences or create targeted ads. Consumers are no longer willing to have their personal data collected without consent.
As third-party cookies go away it raises the bar for marketers. Because marketers now have customer data platforms (CDP) to better understand their customers without relying on third-party cookies, they can capitalize on first-party data in a secure way.
The benefit of an event-based model is that it offers deeper insights to marketers across all of their websites and mobile apps. Event-based targeting enables marketers to track metrics like button clicks, video plays, scrolls, and customer journeys, and even create customized solutions like lookalike audiences based on past user events that target net new leads who have similar digital behaviors.
To figure out who to market to, maybe you purchase data from an external vendor to identify users who engage with DIY content and who might be most interested in your products. This data is often attached to third-party cookies and can be used to build a user segment with this information.
As it stands now, if a user happens to browse your site on their Google Chrome browser and wanders away, you could spend some extra budget to use marketing technology to retarget them based on third-party cookies. This essentially means following them across social media and web sites to encourage them to re-engage with your brand.
Within Analytics implementations, third-party cookies are used for cross-domain tracking and for advertising use cases, including retargeting ads. Third-party cookies allow you to identify visitors as they visit different domains that you own or as they are shown ads on sites that you do not own.
First-party cookies are domain-specific and are created by customer websites and stored in client browsers as users visit the websites. All browsers generally accept first-party cookies, although Safari limits the expiry of some types of first-party cookies.
These changes in user behavior and the resulting privacy regulations have paved the way to a new era in marketing: that of cookieless tracking. Due to the reduction in third-party cookies, many marketers are looking for new ways to market their products to their target audience.
Most search engines and browsers have therefore decided to eliminate third-party cookies altogether. Moreover, new privacy protection regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are making it more difficult for websites to provide advertisers with third-party cookies. For websites to comply with the GDPR, they have to give users the right to opt out of third-party cookies and data collection, thereby deleting their information from the website permanently.
Third-party cookies are particularly useful when it comes to retargeting, too, since they can track users across multiple sites. Marketing and advertising teams now have to make the shift to contextual advertising in place of third-party cookie tracking.
In 2017, Apple released Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) to protect the privacy of Safari users. Initially, ITP targeted third-party cookies, blocking them completely. Cookies are small files on user data that store preferences and visits. Users can block cookies if they do not want their information stored by sites. They help with page customization and save important data to track, identify, or authenticate a returning user to a website.
This was a huge problem for marketing and tech companies, since cookies helped them determine visitor flow and patterns. It largely limited cross-site tracking to make it harder for publishers to see user activity across multiple sites. Apple has now moved to restrict certain cookie uses with limitations and restrictions in Safari for its fifth version of ITP.
According to Apple, the goal of Safari Intelligent Tracking Prevention is to limit the ability of publishers and advertisers to track website visitors, while still enabling websites to function normally. Safari ITP identifies domains being used to track a user, then purges any tracking data they wish to store on the user's device. The EU recently came out with a GDPR requirement that brands must treat cookies as personal information and inform visitors on use. Web publishers have had to include cookie opt-ins since that change went into effect and follow new restrictions to align with that GDPR requirement.
Intelligent Tracking Prevention can also affect the accuracy of digital tools such as Google Analytics, Segment, or Salesforce Interaction. The ITP cookie expiration limitations for Safari users can affect segments created and tracking historical behavior.
Yes, publishers can still get ads in front of their visitors, they just can not target with third-party cookies. Safari users can access ad blockers that stop the ad tags from even loading. In these cases, ads would not be displayed because of the additional plugin the user installed.
Next, we have behavioral audience building. This process uses data from third-party cookies to create models of users with similar interests and behaviors. These models can then be used for targeted advertising.
The tracking cookie continues to crumble. Firefox and Safari already block tracking cookies by default, and not only has Google's Chrome browser joined the third-party-cookie-blocking fray, the search giant has announced that it will not roll out alternative user-level ad identifiers to replace third-party cookies.
The moment that Google's Chrome browser blocks third-party cookies by default will be the day the final nail is put in the coffin for tracking consumers with third-party cookies. Chrome is the dominant web browser with well over 60% market share, so its stance on blocking cookies has a huge impact on the advertising and marketing industry. That moment was supposed to arrive this year, but Google recently decided to push that out to the second half of 2024, ostensibly give itself more time to develop privacy-friendly alternatives to third-party cookies, and for websites to adopt the changes. The company said that this move is part of a collection of adjustments to its Privacy Sandbox, to chart a better course for advertisers and everyone else on the web. Intense pushback from publishers, advertisers and data brokers that are still unprepared to live without third-party cookies may have also contributed to the shift.
Google has been characteristically mum over the last year on whether or not it would introduce new individual user tracking to replace third-party cookies. In early March 2021, they provided the long-awaited answer: the replacement for third-party cookies is first-party data.
Even regulations that limit the amount of time that cookies can last to seven days (or browsers that reduce that to one day) will not negatively affect most call tracking users. Our data suggest that 90% of customers call within one hour of being shown a phone number. Browsers with blocking technology will also refresh the cookie-clearing time counter upon a user revisiting a website.
Although Chrome is not the first browser to disable third-party cookies, it has the highest market share at 64% of all users. Safari (ranked second) and Firefox (ranked third) stopped tracking users via third-party cookies over a year ago.
When all major browsers stop supporting third-party cookies, it will become impossible to set up audience targeting and frequency capping for 99% of users. Meanwhile, cross-site audience targeting will become a thing of the past. One way it can play out is that non-personalised ads will overflow the Internet, and the effectiveness of advertising campaigns (ROAS) will decrease.
The most advanced Google solution in this area to date is FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). The FLoC algorithm tracks the websites that the users visit and combines the latter into cohorts of interests that can be targeted with ads. This solution provides that:
Although Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox blocked third-party tracking cookies several years ago, Google Chrome continued to use them. More importantly, Chrome controls 60% of the global web browser market share. So, not only are cookies going away, but so is a massive source of consumer data for the advertising industry.
The death of the third-party cookie will create more privacy for internet users as they move across the web. But, the change presents a large challenge for marketers who rely on third-party data and programmatic advertising to drive their campaigns.
For years, web browsers have leveraged cookies to track users and save their personal information. Marketers rely on this information to improve audience segmentation, multi-touch attribution models, user experience, messaging, website analytics, and advertising campaigns.
Brand marketers use third-party cookie data to build profiles on their target consumers. They may also use this data to understand what their visitors are looking at on other websites. Ad tech companies also use third-party cookies to communicate and build larger data sets.
Marketers are left wondering how they will target the right consumers online without the data provided by third-party cookies. Many believe the loss of these cookies will have a profound impact on the future of digital advertising.
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