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?
A cookie is a small file placed on your computer when you visit a website. They are used heavily throughout the web for many functions. Here are just a few:
- Allow you to revisit a site and not have to login every time
- Loyalty program identification
- Auto-fill form fields
- Remember settings & preferences
Those above use cases are all well and good. But then cookies started being used for tracking visits across the web. The cookie sits on your computer, with your ID number for that tracker, and observes your traffic all day - reporting back to the tracker’s server what you are doing.
This isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. The IDs are used to help determine what ads you would most likely want to receive - especially in display advertising.
When a 3rd party cookie reports back that your machine and IP address are going to a lot of pickleball sites, it might enable ads to show up on websites related to pickleball.
This behavior has been going on for a long time.
For example, I went to espn.com to check on my fantasy hockey team (2nd place at moment). By clicking on the 3 dots in the top right corner of my Chrome browser, and then choosing More Tools, Developer Tools, I can see the cookies ESPN put on my machine:
The cookie for imrworldwide.com is for Nielsen, a known measurement tool.
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.
Sophisticated media buyers and PPC agencies will have to make data an even more important part of their strategy: Activating data inside of ad platforms, even more sophisticated strategies around audiences, and measurement they can trust and act on (I know guy for this last one fyi).
How is 1st party cookie tracking different from 3rd party cookie tracking?
1st party cookies collect data for the website that the user arrived on, loaded from the domain that the user is on.
1st party data is data collected by the brand directly from its audience, on channels it owns, such as its website.
The data is not sold. And it is not given to other parties for other uses. It’s strictly to help the brand’s relationship with its audience.
This contrasts with 3rd party cookie data collection usually. Its purpose is to make money for others in whatever way that 3rd party’s company decides.
The part that is irritating about 3rd party cookies is the following you around the web, forever.
With a 1st party cookie, the trail starts when you arrive on the brand’s website, and ends when you leave the brand’s website.
What is server to server tracking?
Server to server tracking sends data directly to servers without relying on a user’s browser. This eliminates the need for the user’s device to have technical involvement.
Identification is done on the server through sophisticated algorithms. Not as easy to do as simply saving a cookie text file with a userID, but works. It also has the advantage of allowing the possibility of cross-domain tracking if a brand has different domains for website, store, and blog.
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.
