Digital Marketing news
Third Party cookies with Google
Google has made the decision to join Safari and Firefox in blocking third-party cookies in its Chrome web browser. But what are third party cookies and how does it effect marketing? Well cookies are a tiny file dropped by your browser on to your computer’s hard drive when you visit a website, they contain records of your interaction e.g.
what you’ve clicked on or whether you are signed in to a site. Cookies do not collect personal data from your computer, only data created by your browsing. When you enter a web address into your browser,a search is made for existing cookies associated with that site. A third-party cookie are cookies that are set by a website other than you are currently on.
After the recent headlines, some commentators have already labelled the third-party data industry as “dead”. Although there are plenty of unknowns, one thing is certain – come 2022, companies that have built their business on selling third-party data for targeting will need to seek out new opportunities in analytics and insight generation to survive. The need for marketers to learn more about their consumers will not go away, so there is a clear opportunity to expand into this area, but doing so will need to involve different models, higher standards for data ethics and compliance with new laws.
For 25 years, as the world changed around us, one thing in advertising remained constant: the cookie. Google’s announcement that it will eliminate third-party cookies from Chrome by 2022 to provide users with “more transparency, choice and control over how their data is used” is a good reminder of the primacy of user needs and that in advertising, as in all things, you should take nothing for granted.
So, what do we know about our new post-third-party cookie future? Right now, the answer is not much, but this gives us the opportunity to imagine and determine a better one. Google has announced its “Privacy Sandbox”, a collection of anonymised signals within a user’s Chrome browser that provide an alternative to cookies in a privacy-first way. Currently in its infancy, the particulars will be ironed out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – the law makers for the internet – over the next two years.
For brands and agencies, new “clean room” environment like Google’s Ads Data Hub, and platforms from newer companies like Infosum that enable data matching and analysis in privacy-first environments, may become vital tools for matching datasets in an ethical and compliant way.