THE DEATH OF THE 3RD PARTY COOKIE
You may have heard the sky is falling yet again - google’s chrome has begun the phase out of 3rd party cookies. This move was announced back in 2019 - and then delayed multiple times. But it’s finally here, and it’s time to deal with it!
WHAT IS HAPPENING
Starting this week with 1% of all Chrome users, and by the end of Q3 for all Chrome users, 3rd party cookies will be removed.
Google kept pushing this off due to the reported “harmful effects” this might have on the adtech ecosystem. That sounds like $$$ to me. It got me wondering how this might affect my browser - but I had cleared my browser history 1 day ago- and yet I have 492 sites with cookies. I probably went to 10 websites that day - what gives.
WHAT IS 3RD PARTY COOKIE TRACKING?
WHY DO 3RD PARTY COOKIES NEED TO BE BANNED?
The entire ad tech industry has been under pressure to increase user privacy. There are instances where 3rd party cookies track user website activity without consent or knowledge across the entire web, forever.
Under privacy pressure, especially from Europe, Google is going to remove the practice of 3rd party cookies.
It should be noted that Firefox (2013) and Safari (2020) had already removed 3rd party cookies and taken even further steps in the name of user privacy.
I feel like Chris Mills ↗ says it best HERE ↗
“However, in the worst cases, third-party cookies are used to track users around the web, building up a detailed profile of them that could include not only interests but also deeply personal information such as gender, sexuality, religion, political affiliation, etc. This information can be used to build creepy, invasive online experiences and is also sold to other third parties. In such cases, they are referred to as tracking cookies.”
THE IMMEDIATE IMPACT
The removal of 3rd party cookies is NOT going to result in a massively more private web browsing experience. If anything, it forces advertisers to do more work, and share more personal data, with more systems, in order to get accurate ad targeting.
Which is ironic, since I’m pretty sure the legal goal was privacy.
Instead, you must share all your data with big AdTech to help with targeting!
For Google, Meta, Pinterest, and Microsoft ads - display ad retargeting is going to be much less precise. This means performance could go down. Which means advertisers will pay less. Which means their revenue could drop.
If the price per click comes down due to the less accurate targeting, perhaps this won’t even register as much of an issue.
Small websites and blogs relying on display ad click revenue from Google might see less revenue, because the ads are less relevant.
Attribution will lose signal in some cases - which is one reason Google & Meta want you to trust their black box, delayed, and unverifiable attribution reports.
Understanding the Contrast
HOW DOES THIS IMPACT
WICKED REPORTS?
Wicked Reports is completely unaffected. Since 2014 we have used 1st party data, and 1st party cookies, as the foundation of our technology.
We made this decision because it's the best data signal for our customers and the right thing to do.
We use server to server tracking 99% of the time.
We use a 1st party cookie for 1 unique use case.
We never track people off of the website of the brand, and we don’t sell the data we collect. It’s used by the brand and agencies of that brand only.
