It's Time Out -Third-Party Cookies

Yitong Chen
Marketing in the Age of Digital
3 min readMar 28, 2021

What the Ban Means for Google

Google’s plan to do away with third-party cookies from its Chrome browser by the year 2022 is not pleasant news for numerous digital advertisers. However, that is good news for Google since it does not have to count on third-party cookies to influence its substantial advertisement business. Google dominates the web browser and also the digital advertisement markets and depends on third-part cookies for a few sections of its advertising business. Google may suffer due to this transformation. However, the company assembles a huge amount of first-party information on internet consumers via its numerous services like Gmail, Maps, Google Home, and even YouTube. The prohibition will not impact such kind of data gathering. In fact, the ban could highly favor Google since collecting data via its services could turn out to be valuable as third-party ads targeting data sources dry up.

What the Ban Means for Advertisers

On the other hand, advertisers will be negatively affected by the ban. Third-party cookie information enables advertisers to learn concerning their web visitors’ general online activities like the websites that regularly visit, purchases, and interest shown on multiple websites. With such kind of detailed data, advertisers can build substantial visitors’ profiles. Also, advertisers can use the data to generate a retargeting list, which they can use to send advertisements to their past visitors or even individuals with the same web profiles. Therefore, marketers that highly depend on robust data for online marketing, pop-up advertisements, or even a pinpointed audience-targeting approach will be negatively affected by the ban.Google’s move to ban third-party tracking cookies risks putting the not well-developed advertising companies out of business. Generally, the action will affect many companies like brands that advertise products and services on the internet, advertising tech networks, and news companies that push those advertisements to all corners of the web

What the Ban Means for Users

The ban of third-party tracking cookies is excellent news for users since it heightens user privacy and even security. Third-party cookies are made use of by advertising firms to track users as they browse on the internet, creating users’ profiles and their interests founded on the websites that they visit. Advertising firms then use the created users’ profiles to send ads to the users. Google’s third-party cookies exist on so many websites and feed the company with adequate information concerning the sites that users usually visit. That strengthens a section of its huge ad business. Therefore, users feel that their privacy is usually highly invaded, which is why Google aims to keep track of users’ browsing routines all through the web and place users in different audiences established on those routines. Google plans on accomplishing that by using the Federated Learning of Cohorts. Therefore, advertisers are supposed to target their advertisements to cohorts or different audiences instead of targeting individual users. Generally, Google will technically deliver aimed ads to users but will do that in a secure way.

Marketers Rely on the Third-party Cookie to Generate Data

What Marketers need to do to Well-Prepared

Google is gradually phasing out the ban instead of putting a sudden ban, giving advertisers time to develop an action plan. Marketers and data engineers should actively search for solutions to decide what will take place next. Also, the other most excellent thing marketers should do is to remain updated by following news associated with third-party cookies and various information privacy moves that could affect their business. Generally, marketers that depend on third-party information should begin considering other options now. They should also scrutinize any software or any solution that could help them excellently transition away from third-party cookies. . Lastly, marketers can think of more fundamental techniques that they can still make use of to reach their audiences without relying on cookies, huge data amounts, or even hyper-targeted advertisements

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