After Google Banned Third-Party Cookie, Who Hurt Most?
Since 1994 when the website cookie was first invented, both advertisement companies and website users have been getting benefits from it for more than 26 years. In these years, many brands are using this method to collecting their website visitors' data and keep tracking their behaviors. Website cookies can help companies or brands get specific customer segmentation, in order to improve their user experience and send accurate advertisements.
The situation changed last year when Google announced they will start to ban third-party cookies based on the customer's privacy issues, which is reasonable for Google since they already had two large amounts of charges by France government due to violating privacy agreements. The whole thing looks like Google is becoming more respectful of their users’ data, and following the rules, but it was not just this simple.
Most of the companies do not have direct access to connect their customers, and they have to use cookies to find who has great potential to become their customers. Customers use web browsers to open different websites, once Google stoped the third-party cookies, all those websites will not be able to accurately collect data anymore. Thus, inaccurately customer segmentation will greatly reduce advertisement companies' profit. That is why especially for the online advertising industry, this news created a disruptive influence.
So, what about Google themselves’ online ads business? The answer is not really affected. The reason is as one of the leading internet companies all across the world, Google has an incredible market share on web browsers and ad display channels. According to Statista, by January 2021, the Google Chrome web browser has a total of 60.17% users on kind of devices, the Safari in second place only has 18.81%. Therefore, Google can still have ways to collect people’s data to do their business. For example, Google can know what people want to buy based on what they searched on their web browser, then still send accurate ads to those people. At the same time, Google is also testing a new method call FLoC, which is a different method from cookies but also has high effectiveness compare to cookies.
When this FLoC method is fully applied, the online advertising companies have to go through Google to collect customers' data instead of directly get it by themselves when using cookies. The power will be highly hosted by Google.
For marketers, we all need to find out new methods to avoid this bad situation. The advertisement company Criteo brings out a new method called “identifiers” to collect data and replace the traditional cookie method. Same as another technology company The Trade Desk, they also designed a tech called “Unified ID 2.0” to decreasing reliance on third-party cookie use.
Google banned cookie use is definitely hurt others more not Google themselves, but with the development of the new methods, the situation will not be as bad as we imagined.
