The Death of the (Third-Party) Cookie 🍪
Question(s) of the day: How does this change your digital strategy? What will marketers be pivoting to? My new favorite word.
How did we get here?
Ever since the popularity of digital, advertisers and marketers relied on third-party cookies. Third-party cookies are “crumbs” that are used to track your activity over the worldwide web. Due to these cookies, advertisers are able to figure out what ads to serve you that are relevant to put in front of you. There was one book I read in elementary school that talked about cookies — it was a cute chapter book that had the two main characters centered around websites and cookies, but for the life of me, I can’t remember the title.
But alas, the third-party cookies have met their fate. Safari and Firefox have already phased them out since 2013 because of the heightened concerns over data privacy and transparency over the years. Google Chrome will follow suit by 2022 — this is huge news in the advertising world because this Google browser has a commanding lead of 67% share in the browser market. In addition, nearly 90% of Google’s revenue is generated through advertising.[1]
Why is this important?
Without third-party cookie tracking, publishers will have to lean on more to contextual targeting. Similar to what magazine publishers do. However, Google won’t be phasing out all cookies. Advertisers are able to still use first-party cookie to track basic data about your own website’s visitors. Of course, this limits the scope of what marketers can use to track their potential target audience’s activity over the net.
Here’s a refresher on what first-party cookies are: a code that is generated and stored on your website visitor’s computer by default when someone visits your site.[2] For example, you know how Amazon remembers your password and remembers your browsing history — yep, there’s a cookie involved. And not the edible kind.
My hot take(s):
- It’ll be a challenge for the digital frontier. I’ll admit we’ve been too reliant on third-party cookies to build our strategies. It made sense for us to depend on them, since they gave us such robust insights about our target audience.
- I’m not sure if we’ll be taking a step back if we brush up on contextual targeting. It’s a valid alternative, given the circumstances. Would CPMs rise to meet the demand?
- If we take 3rd party cookies and shift over to 1st party cookies, this will give the consumer much more control on what they want shared with the company. I like transparency — I’m one of those weird people who turns off their Location Services because I don’t want Apple to figure out where I am. Leaning into 1st party cookies provide a level of trust from advertisers and publishers in a way that is more credible. We give the decision-making power back to consumer, instead of blasting ads to them as marketers.
xx.
