What should digital marketing companies do after Google blocks third-party cookies?
Restricting access to data for third-party cookies is becoming an increasingly visible trend.
Recently, Google announced that it would phase out third-party cookies that track users across websites on Chrome browsers, naming them the Privacy Sandbox program. Justin Schuh, Google’s director of engineering at Chrome, said in a statement that the program, which will be completed within two years, is designed to better protect users’ privacy.
Chrome is currently the world’s most popular browser. Google Chrome accounted for 69.28 percent of the market share, more than 50 percentage points ahead of second place, according to data released by NetMarketShare.
The digital marketing industry relies on third-party cookies in browsers. Cookies are essentially records and stores the data and behavior of users online. Using cookie data, platform enterprises can conduct personalized in-depth analysis, target audience according to advertisers’ needs, one-on-one communication, provide multi-channel delivery, pay according to performance, so as to achieve accurate delivery of ads, and can be based on the target audience to achieve real-time pricing of ads. Digital ads are delivered accurately based on crowd characteristics, reducing the waste of advertising costs. Cookies play a very important role in the development of digital advertising, known as the “cornerstone of digital advertising.” Shares of Criteo, a well-known advertising technology company, shares closed down 15.9 % to hit a 52-week low after Google announced the plan.
It is clear that browser manufacturers blocking third-party cookies and restricting the flow of data to advertising agencies and intermediaries will have a huge impact on the digital advertising ecosystem: third-party digital advertisers will miss most of their data sources and affect their business development; For end users, they can control the data shared out of their browsers for better privacy.
In my own view, I think as a customer it’s a good news for us. Because we don’t need to see ads related to your search on Amazon in last week. Also, if you are marketers, you don’t need to be panic. Because Google is not banning all cookies right now. Only third-party cookies on browsers are planned to be phased out. However, first-party cookies that track basic data about visitors to your website remain secure.
Therefore, faced with the trend of third-party cookies gradually exiting, the digital marketing industry has begun to do a lot of preparation. For example, The Widely used Device ID (mobile device number) in the Chinese market and the recent digital fingerprint extraction technology have been used as alternatives to restricting cookie tracking of user data. Zhao Wei, LiveRamp’s China operations director said, “it's not optimistic about the future of the technology, as Device ID also has privacy vulnerabilities in the Chinese market.”
I hope that the entire digital marketing ecosystem in the future should be based on the full authorization of users. As a marketer, start to think about an alternative way in the market industry. Although there is no good technical solution at present, but we should work together to find a way to build this ecosystem. Be creative and protect our privacy!
