How to Exist in a Cookieless Reality?

With the rapidly approaching changes in the online advertising space, many marketers worry that their everyday work will soon change dramatically. That’s linked to the news about Google Chrome stopping its support of 3rd-party cookies and following the footsteps of other popular browsers, such as Safari, Firefox, and Edge. Google joining them is the nail in the coffin of 3rd party cookies, as this browser has over 60% of the market share. How will this revolution change the future? And will the cookieless world really be that bad?

Why are cookies so crucial for your ads?

Even though cookies are just small text files, they have been the base of advertising efforts of countless companies. They collect and store information about the user preferences regarding the functionality of websites and are then used to change the domain to the liking of the user the next time they visit it. That, of course, includes advertising preferences and displaying ads that are tailored to the user’s preferences. It’s not a surprise that many brands fear a cookieless future then! 3rd party cookies are a crucial part of many advertising methods, including targeting and retargeting. That last technique is especially important for marketers as it allows them to reach users who have visited their website and show them personalized ads across other domains. 

Will 1st party data help you in cookieless reality?

3rd party cookies are not the only ones we use on a regular basis. Marketers tend to forget about 1st party cookies, which also are used to collect and hold information about all the ways the user interacts with a certain domain. It can gather data about language settings, products the user looks for, the type of content the user interacts with or their shopping cart. However, there’s a key difference between 1st and 3rd party cookies. 1st party data doesn’t track users across other domains, it focuses solely on the website the cookies are assigned to.

How to use 1st party cookies in advertising?

Even though 3rd party cookies will soon be forgotten by all the major browsers, we can still use 1st party data to optimise marketing campaigns and achieve better results. Because these types of cookies work within your website or app, you can use them to discover products and/or services users are interested in and implement this data in retargeting campaigns. There’s also a solution officially endorsed by a couple of the most popular browsers, including Edge and Google Chrome. This method employs privacy-preserving APIs that make advertising across different websites possible but provides high privacy to users in the process. It works by grouping similar users into clusters and directing to them advertising content. Ads are targeted to whole groups and not singular users, which preserves their privacy much better. And you can still use retargeting across numerous websites. With this method, a cookieless future doesn’t seem so bleak, right?