What Will Happen to Online Marketing When Google Kills 3rd Party Cookies?

This isn’t fresh news at all, as Google announced it will kill 3rd party cookies more than a year ago. Still, as we are getting closer to the final kill of these cookies, we are getting more interested in how digital marketing will work in the future. A good thing is that Google gave us a lot of time to adjust, so it’s pretty much certain that online marketing won’t vanish after 2022. It will just get a different form, a form that will take privacy issues to the next level.

What Are 3rd Party Cookies and Why Are They So Important?

For a long time, 3rd party cookies have been the most important tool of ad tech companies. Simply, this was the most important ingredient needed for good communication between ad companies. Thanks to them, marketing companies were able to track users successfully and provide the best possible marketing experience. These cookies are vastly important for the whole process of digital advertising, including not just planning and activation of ads, but also the ability to track them and measure their performance. 

The problem with 3rd party cookies is that they harvest an enormous amount of personal data, such as individual IP addresses, sensitive search and browser history, specific details about devices, private information about health, sexuality etc.

The whole digital marketing system is based on third-party cookies and can’t work properly without them. So, Google will have to create a completely new system. How it’s going to look, still remains a mystery.

What Future Brings

Google has already prepared the next step in killing 3rd party cookies. This is some kind of a transition period and it brings a new policy. It supports the sharing of cookies between sites only when cookies are protected and that means that the site must have a valid https protocol in order to share cookies between different websites.

Once this transition period ends, we do expect that Google will come up with good alternatives and we expect there will be more of them. One of the first things that come to mind is a click-through attribution solution. However, keep in mind that this method turned out not to be particularly effective. That is why using an unlimited attribution window report software from wickedreports.com can help you with the impact assessment of your marketing ads. This particularly refers to things like measuring the impact of video, banner and social ads. Simply, such a method doesn’t expose consumers to a campaign successfully enough. 

Independent marketing companies are working on their own solutions as well. According to them, it will take a lot of time to create a system that can be as precise, especially if we consider the privacy issue. It’s not hard to conclude that this will probably be a long and painful process for many digital marketing companies.

What websites will be affected the most?

Comparison site will be affected or loose their business totally. Site like Foxbonus (casino) or Momondo (flights) wont be able to communicate the leads without 3rd part cookies and their commission will therefore no be able to track.

This could be dangerous because it may lead to new ways for comparison sites to make money including flat fees which means that the highest bidder gets exposure instead of the best one. 

Summary

To summarize things, the end of 3rd party cookies definitely doesn’t mean the end of the digital marketing. Moreover, the demand for such services will only become bigger in the future and this will only force Google and independent marketing companies to come up with a variety of alternatives. Time will show which one will turn out to be the best one.