July 22, 2024—the announcement heard ‘round the world.
Four-and-a-half years after announcing its plans to deprecate third-party cookies from its Chrome browser, Google decided to keep the legacy identifier after all.
While it might seem to advertisers that Google’s waffling wasted a lot of their time these last few years, it greatly benefited the industry. Brands are now far less reliant on cookies and are more focused on reaching the consumers most interested in their products or services in a privacy-by-design way.
Let’s be honest with each other: third-party cookies were never very tasty for digital advertisers.
Yes, they served their purpose way back when real-time bidding was first becoming a way to buy media and reach potential customers. In those early days, third-party cookies made cross-site tracking and analysis of an internet user’s behavior easier, from other websites they visited to items they purchased to their interests. This detailed data helped advertisers build robust visitor profiles and create a retargeting list usable for ad delivery to past visitors and consumers with similar web profiles.
But so much has changed—in how Internet users shop and want to engage with brands, in how technology has evolved, and more. It’s been apparent for some time that third-party cookies have long not served their original intended purpose. Third-party cookies became the hallmark of stale, unreliable data as time passed. Often, the story they told about a given consumer was dated and, therefore, inaccurate. This led to Internet users seeing ads that didn’t apply to them or that marketed an item they had already bought, resulting in them getting creeped out by irrelevant ads following them around the web.
As consumers began caring more about how brands used their data to send them these annoying ads, a variety of privacy initiatives and regulations began cropping up worldwide–from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe to the California Consumer Privacy Act in the U.S. Other browsers like Safari and Firefox had deprecated third-party cookies even before Google’s now-canceled plans to deliver a better Internet experience to its users. As a result, 40% of US web traffic already came from people blocking third-party cookies.
Google helped spur necessary action
Google leaving us all hanging for four years has produced a long overdue industry pivot.
Since two-thirds of web browsing in the U.S. happens on Chrome, most marketers felt they had no choice but to source alternatives to cookies to preserve their business and revenue-generating potential. So, they increasingly turned to first-party data as the basis for cookie-replacement solutions. As a result, third-party cookies are declining as an active signal.
Now, with Google claiming that instead of deprecating third-party cookies full stop, it will allow its users to determine cookie placement. As a result, it’s very possible that cookie availability for audience resolution will drop substantially. Such a move could result in a 50% decrease, if not more, for third-party cookies to be user-permitted. In addition, doing omnichannel marketing—now table stakes for all marketers—doesn’t require third-party cookies. As evidence of this shift, we’ve seen the rise of first-party-data-based, emerging media channels, such as Programmatic Direct Mail (PDM), connected TV, and digital-out-of-home.
Brands are wise to still seek solutions without third-party cookies for audience resolution and performance delivery.
For years, the industry has discussed how cookie deprecation means advertisers (and publishers) should refocus on their first-party data. It’s accurate, it’s recent, and it’s trusted because it comes from the consumer.
But we all know that as great as first-party data is, it doesn’t scale. This means it can tell you about the customers and prospects who visit your website but nothing about what they do elsewhere on the web or about unknown users.
That’s where shared first-party data comes in. Shared first-party data can help you get to know your current known users better and tap into a whole universe of consumers like your best customers. Here’s how it works.
Rather than just using a brand’s own data, shared first-party data combines billions of online household, intent, and transaction data points from hundreds of premium brands. But this data set is privacy-protected, meaning no brand can see what data belongs to another brand. Instead, it is anonymized and pooled together to provide greater holistic benefit to the brands that provide their data to a shared asset. Other benefits of turning to shared first-party data over third-party data include:
- GREATER RELEVANCE WITH REAL-TIME DATA via online intent signals that are refreshed daily, resulting in greater recency, efficacy, and performance.
- BRIDGED ONLINE AND OFFLINE DATA through the household address as a stable and more persistent identifier.
- BETTER CONFIDENCE IN TARGETING THE RIGHT USERS through maximum reach and scale.
- PREDICTED PURCHASE BEHAVIOR through optimization informed by millions of daily online and offline transactions.
How PebblePost can help
PebblePost’s proprietary first-party Graph helps brands that seek highly effective targeting, connection, and action even now that third-party cookies are here to stay.
We help you power relevance in the real world by securely connecting billions of household, intent, and transaction data points from hundreds of premium brands with our privacy-by-design framework. With this unique data asset on your side, you can tap into unparalleled reach, relevance, and performance that scales with your business.
Ready to learn more about how we can help you navigate the ongoing saga of third-party cookies? Get in touch with us today.
