The Death of Cookies Will Create Data Monopolies
Working in marketing is not unlike playing a real-life game of Frogger. The rules are constantly changing, and new obstacles are forever appearing in your path. No strategy stays evergreen forever, and it’s easy to fall into patterns and rely too heavily on things that have become second nature.
We’ve now spent the better part of two decades using third-party data to help us effectively target consumers, but the end is coming. We better be ready to pivot — or risk being squashed by the big machine.
Ding, Dong — Time’s Up for Third-Party Cookies
Safari and Firefox got the ball rolling a few years back, but now that Google is joining in, we can officially kiss third-party data as a cornerstone for our strategy discussions goodbye. In January, Google Chrome announced that it is phasing out the use of third-party cookies on the browser and expects to complete the process by 2022.
Ostensibly, Google’s reasoning behind this move is to address user privacy concerns. As Justin Schuh, Google’s director for Chrome engineering, told TechCrunch: “This is our strategy to re-architect the standards of the web, to make it privacy-preserving by default.” With global trends — such as the EU’s lauded GDPR — increasing pressure on tech companies to enact privacy measures, this doesn’t really come as a big surprise.
In May 2019, Google announced that it would roll out aggressive new privacy controls through the use of SameSite cookie tagging. This set of new protections was meant to prevent nefarious use of third-party cookies from cross-site requests, and it was set to begin in February 2020.
Now, these rules have been rolled back temporarily due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Google acknowledged that users could see disruptions during this time of increased web use if websites were not properly prepared for the initiative to roll out. But we can expect them to be back in place come summer.
When Google first announced the SameSite move, advertisers obviously got up in arms, as so much of how marketing strategy operates relies on our ability to track consumer habits. Google’s response to that was the introduction of the “Privacy Sandbox,” a data aggregator that would provide advertisers with consumer information, stripped of the actual individual user identities. Testing is still in progress for how exactly this will work.
What the Rise of Walled Gardens Will Mean for Marketers
So what will happen to marketing analytics once these changes get going full steam? What does a post-third-party cookie world look like?
Frankly, it’s going to be messy. Analytics and user profiles will be vague and peppered with holes. The kind of thorough data sets we’re used to working from now won’t exist, and we could end up having to make major decisions based on flawed or incomplete data.
Safari blocked all third-party cookies in 2017, and Firefox joined them in the summer of 2019, so there is some context for what this all looks like on the other side. But with Chrome’s massive market share and the now virtually unilateral banning of this type of tracking, we’re really wading into uncharted waters.
Ultimately, moving in this direction is going to create “walled gardens” that put smaller ad networks at a disadvantage, further consolidating power in the hands of the Googles, Facebooks, and Amazons of the world. While Google may insist that this move is motivated by its altruism and a deep concern for the privacy of users, it’s pretty clear to me that this is a power move.
I say that because they’ve already done it before. Starting back in 2011–2013, a number of Google Analytics users noticed that a majority of their reported keyword searches were coming back as “Keyword (not provided)”. Google insisted that in those instances, they couldn’t share the term the user searched in order to find your site, because it would compromise user privacy.
Of course, Google AdWords advertisers were still getting results for their paid search terms. So Google apparently wasn’t too concerned about the privacy of customers who happened to click on Google ads. Or, this is about ad revenue and control. Since this move allowed Google to be the sole provider of Search Remarketing services, it was just another way for them to corner the market.
This most recent shift of blocking third-party cookies virtually removes the ability for any marketer to handle analytics in-house and leaves us all reliant on whatever scraps of data Google chooses to share with us in its “sandbox.” The end result will be, of course, that Google controls what we see and, ultimately, how we make spending decisions. They’ll still have plenty of data to offer up on their users, though, driving investment in Google advertising channels over all other networks.
Most marketers aren’t interested in exploiting people’s privacy, so it’s not the anonymizing of the data that makes Google’s plan so harsh. It’s the fact that they are making themselves the sole keeper of the keys. By bringing all this data under the Chrome umbrella, they’re forcing us to utilize data that is their property to make our spending decisions.
Make First-Party Data Your First Priority
As this plays out, third-party data is going to become harder to find, infinitely less reliable, and more expensive. Targeting consumers with it will become a game of vagaries and it will be significantly harder to measure performance accurately.
Rather than settling for being beholden to these data-hoarding behemoths, I suggest you start beefing up your first-party data strategies today. That information is already at your fingertips, and you own it exclusively, so why not use it? The bonus here is that you can tailor your data gathering processes precisely to fit your brand’s unique needs.
When you think about it, isn’t first-party data more important and impactful than third-party anyway? Yes, it’s useful to be able to retarget users once they leave your site. And it’s nice to see what other parts of the web they’re frequenting, as it helps you build consumer profiles for targeting. But what really gives you a deeper understanding of who your customer is and what they want than how they behave on your site?
Seeing how your customers engage with your brand and determining what they need from you is far more useful than aggressively popping up in their Facebook feed for the 50th time this week. With the help of some solid AI, you can use simple metrics like clicks, paths, time-on-page, and conversions to target your customers effectively. All this based solely on how they’re interacting with your brand across your various touchpoints.
Duck and Dive, Marketers
The next year or so is likely to be a watershed moment for the marketing industry. Don’t wait until the other shoe drops to make a plan for how you’re going to adapt. Start now by cultivating a focus on improving your first-party data collection and analytics. Don’t allow these corporations and their data monopolies to dictate how you run your company.
