On January 4, 2024, Google rolled out a Tracking Protection Tool, for one percent of Chrome users who were selected randomly, that restricts third-party cookies.
Those who are a part of that one percent will come across ‘Browse with more privacy’ when they open Android or Chrome on desktop. If a site in the test is unable to function, Chrome will pop up the option to disable Tracking Protection and revert to the usage of third-party cookies.
Google is not the only platform that is eliminating third-party cookies. In the past, several platforms have taken such steps. In 2020, Apple blocked the usage of third-party cookies, and in September 2021, with the update of iOS 14, it became compulsory for apps to request permission in order to track users.
Mozilla Firefox and Safari, which represented 23 percent of browsing activity (according to a 2021 report), are other platforms that did away with the cookie in 2013. They introduced Intelligent Tracking Prevention that blocked third-party cookies by default and limited certain first-party cookies.
To understand third party cookies, let us look at this example. A user visited the website of a jewellery brand, and minutes later switched to reading news on a media website. The user gets served ads of the items he searched on the former website. This is what third party cookies do.
Third party cookies have been created by parties who are not the owners of the website. Most of the third-party cookies are tracking cookies which track a user across different websites to study what a user is likely to purchase.
Third-party cookies are used for Retargeting and Ad-Serving. In the former, cookies redirect the users to a website that sells products as per the preferences of a user. In the latter, cookies deliver personal ads that target a user’s aspirations.
When cookies are placed by a third party on other websites, they help companies or marketers track all the information pertaining to the user, which helps them personalise their offerings as per their tastes and preferences.
Elimination of third party cookies: Impact on marketers
Marketers Storyboard18 spoke to say that operating without cookies will initially pose challenges when it comes to targeting and personalisation. This would make it difficult to tailor ads as per the interest of the users.
The absence of third-party cookies would affect use cases like retargeting, customer loyalty, enriched profile and audience discovery. These are used in programmatic ad delivery, and would impact the measurement of the ad money spent.
Marketers are setting consumer digital organisations, concentrating on owned media platforms to collect first-party data.
Another alternative to third-party cookies is depending on walled gardens. A walled garden is a closed ecosystem in which all the operations are controlled by an ecosystem operator. Some of the biggest known walled gardens are Google’s Ad Data Hub, Meta’s Facebook Advanced Analytics and Amazon Marketing Cloud.
Brands are comfortable partnering with all the walled gardens, which account for nearly 80 percent of digital advertising today.
But brands are building their own first-party data strategies. Every brand should behave like a “direct to consumer” brand with a direct relationship with the consumer, instead of being dependent on walled gardens as intermediaries.
Read More: MAdtech Point: What will happen when third party cookies get totally deprecated?