The end of third-party cookies: What are the consequences for your business?
In January 2020, Google announced that it would remove third-party cookies in Google Chrome, the most popular browser in the world. From that moment on, we started talking about a cookieless future.
Although Google has postponed the deprecation of third-party cookies to January 2025, professionals are already starting to look for valuable alternatives.
In this article, we explain everything you need to know about the cookieless future and what it means for your business.
What are cookies and why are they disappearing?
Cookies are small scripts that websites install on the device or browser of users when they grant consent. There’s a difference between first-party cookies, which are managed directly by the website owner, and third-party cookies, which are installed by third-party companies through specific elements of the website. If you have a website, you can check what kind of cookies are running on your site with a cookie scanner.
Third-party cookies are at the heart of the cookieless future. These cookies can track how users behave online, in order to personalize their experience. However, this type of tracking has often been criticized and seen as an invasion of users’ privacy.
The challenge of the cookieless future is to find alternatives that can balance the right to privacy of users with the profit of digital marketing professionals all around the world.
How are big tech companies adapting to the cookieless future?
Actually, the cookieless future has already begun, because many browsers decided to block third-party cookies as a default option long ago.
- In June 2022, Mozilla Firefox introduced Total Cookie Protection and made it the default for all Firefox users. With this protection, tracking tools cannot “follow” the user from site to site, but are limited to recording behavior on a single website.
- Safari also blocked third-party cookies by default in early 2020 with a feature called Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), which limits access to user information.
The real impact, however, will come from the deprecation of third-party cookies in Google Chrome, which is used by 65.31% of users worldwide. Announced for 2020, the deprecation was expected to begin this year with an experimental phase involving 1% of Chrome users, but was recently delayed again to January 2025.
Apparently, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) expressed its concerns about Privacy Sandbox, Google’s alternative to third-party cookies. In particular, Privacy Sandbox would neither allow fair competition, increasing Google’s dominance in the digital advertising market, nor guarantee user privacy.
For its part, Google said it’s willing to work with authorities and industry professionals to seek a solution that protects users’ privacy rights and the advertisers’ profit. Reviewing these processes and reaching a new agreement with the authorities has forced the company to postpone the deprecation once again.
What are the consequences for your business?
Of course, the people most affected by this change will be those who work with data, particularly those in digital marketing and advertising. In fact, the data collected through third-party profiling cookies – which has made it possible to collect very precise data about users and use it in targeted and personalized advertising campaigns – may come to an end.
For example, marketers may have to give up retargeting, the advertising strategy of showing ads related to a website to people who have already visited that website. In general, we can expect a less personalized online experience, but also a less invasive one from a privacy perspective.
If you are an advertiser or work in digital marketing, the cookieless future may seem like the end of your business. Don’t despair! There are many viable alternatives to third-party cookies that will allow you to continue to optimize your ad campaigns. In addition, there are other tricks you can use.
First, you can focus more on first-party data, which is the data you collect directly from your users. This is valuable information because it tends to be very accurate and respectful of user privacy. In this case, you may need to get explicit user cookie consent with a notice on your website. An easy way to do this could be by implementing a cookie consent manager on your website.
Then you can go back to what is called contextual targeting, which allows you to get around cookies by showing your ads in the most appropriate context for your business (e.g., if you sell sporting items, show your ads on blogs that talk about sports).
Finally, you can focus your efforts on producing valuable content that solves the pain points of your target audience and helps you become an influential voice in your niche.