The cookie-free future has been delayed; if you have no idea what this means, here is a quick translation. Google originally planned to phase out third-party cookies at the beginning of 2022, heralding the ‘cookie-free future,’ but Google has pushed that date back nearly two years — to the end of 2023.
The Cookie-Free Future: Why Should We Care?
As a marketer, you no doubt have hundreds of competing priorities — each of them urgent and presumably with an immediate impact on revenue. So you’d be forgiven for wondering why you should worry about something in over two years– but you should revisit your thought, and here’s why.
The removal of third-party cookies flips the digital advertising world on its head. Their deprecation implies that serving digital advertising, retargeting, and cross-domain tracking is virtually entirely at a halt.
If your stir is dependent on any of these three factors, consider what your results and revenue would look like if they vanished overnight — because that’s what’s going to happen.
2023: A Cookie-Free Era?
Before you contemplate kicking the can down the road and deferring your cookieless world preparations until far later, remember this: even Google required a deadline extension. They set a deadline for themselves.
If Google, with its near-infinite resources, realized that preparing for the cookieless future would take not just another six months but two years, then warning bells should ring for the rest of us with less modest origins. This implies that the delay in the cookieless future shouldn’t be interpreted as an excuse to postpone, but instead as a reminder that every minute counts in ensuring you’re ready.
Preparing for a cookie-free world
Our top pieces of advice are on our experience assisting marketers worldwide.
Build your First-Party Data Asset
Regarding the cookie-free future, third-party data must be substituted with first-party data. When one type of data goes, the best thing to do is something that may seem obvious: acquire it from somewhere else. That is the information you obtain directly from your existing clients or prospects.
Next-generation solutions can assist you in maintaining data privacy and compliance. The next-generation customer Data Platform enables you to establish more precise segmentation and identify consumers across numerous devices and identifiers. The platform collects data from several sources, unifies it, and then makes it available.
Take Stock of Consent
As you negotiate the cookie-less future and begin constructing your first-party data asset, remember why third-party cookies were removed in the first place: they harmed customer confidence.
Third-party cookies gave the feeling of being ‘following’ around the internet, blurring the limits of customer control over their data. All of this built up a breakdown in trust among customers, marketers, and publishers, which is why cookies are being phased out. Whatever technique you adopt in a cookie-free future, you must avoid making the same error twice.
This is related to our earlier remark about aggregating first-party data. After all, consent for a single user may be obtained in various ways. To stay on top of things, you must combine these several sources. However, like our initial point regarding harmonizing first-party data, this is easier said than done…
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Originally published:WHY MUST MARKETERS BE AWARE OF THE COOKIE-FREE FUTURE?
