Google: Third-Party Cookies Decision, Did This Just Happen?
Many of you are now reading today about Google’s decision to keep third party cookies after four years (or what feels like a decade to marketers) of actively encouraging folks to use a first-party strategy. As a reminder of what this issue was, under pressure from privacy advocates, Google began the process of removing cookies from Chrome and replacing it with a company-led initiative called Google’s Privacy Sandbox.
What does this all mean at the end of the day?
The advertising industry is alive and well and has sort of won to be honest. Despite better efforts to regulate this area from the U.K. and the EU, its hard to deny the magnitude and influence of advertising platforms on this issue. To get a sense of this magnitude, almost $300 (USD) billion was spent in the US in 2023 on advertising (Statista) . For marketers, this decision has a practical benefit, in that this may help smooth out your decisions in your ad targeting. Marketing is still navigating a lot of turbulence in 2024, so on a very real level, this is one less thingto deal with in the short-term. On Sunday nights when some of us are doom-scrolling into Monday, we all know we’re trying to establish what the new Normal is for 2024, this kicks the can down a bit for some status quo.
A real waste of engineering time for larger firms trying to move away from third-party cookies. A lot of engineers have been on high alert for the past two years, updating codebases to meet the looming deadline– while it is nice to think this was time well spent, a lot of wheels and resources have been spun. It seems most of the industry is scratching their heads this morning that this is the final outcome (although not that surprising considering how important 3rd party cookies are to the industry). To that end, it feels like a lot of us have wasted engineering time on what would eventually be a last minute change of mind from Google.
First part data collection strategy is still a good idea (and data privacy). Our colleagues in the EU are vocal advocates of data privacy (and even the climate considerations at this scale of data collection). There is a moral victory that the past four years has created awareness for in-house teams in being more intentional in how we’re collecting data. We’ve created a Conversation with a capital C with this one – marketers play the lead role for both positive reasons (deeper customer insights through first party data collection) and equally annoying reasons (wasting potential technology budget to make changes because we’re beholden to Big Tech for many of our systems).
There will be an escape hatch in Chrome for users to opt-out. What we’re all reading today is that there will be a prompt for users to opt-out of cookies – it’s not clear what this actually looks like, but this issue, situation is still going to play out – but at a different time scale.
Short-term Tactics
After Google’s decision this morning, we know a couple of things:
Google will change its mind again. It’s not if, but when. Ad positioning, customer data acquisition, and user personalization are all too important to totally outsource for Google. 99% of us in marketing depend on Big Tech. We learned a lesson here that four years of planning could change in a moment
We marketers need to invest in our First-Party data collection and analysis. We can’t play games with our data compliance policies. Nor can we afford to wait and be reactive to Google’s wavering stance on third-party cookies. We need to focus on gathering first-party data from CRM, CDP platforms, and offline contacts to use in marketing and ad campaigns (information gathered directly from your audience through interactions on your website or app). This data is more reliable and privacy-compliant.
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