Google Backtracks on Cookie Deprecation
If you work in digital marketing and advertising, unless you live under a rock or are buried in the never-ending breaking news cycle of political drama in our country, you most certainly were prepared to do a backflip when Google announced earlier this week that it will no longer proceed with plans to deprecate third-party cookies in Chrome.
If you’ve read this far and you’re giddy with excitement about Google not deprecating cookies, you’re probably a digital marketer who salivates over data and how to leverage it for better targeting, efficiency, and results. Most of us are thrilled, though some in the industry are frustrated that they have spent oodles of time and made tech investments in a cookieless future that no longer exists.
So, what does this decision mean on a practical level in the near and long term for consumers, marketers, and advertisers? Let’s get into it!
What Was Google’s Deprecation Plan and Why
In 2020 (yep, that year), Google announced that it would deprecate the use of third-party cookies. This sent terror through the hearts of digital marketers worldwide as we cried into our laptops, bemoaned Google at the water cooler, and cursed them in every reporting meeting. Why would Google do this to US, their most loyal fans?! They claimed cookies would be gone by the end of 2022 and launched into testing how they would do this. Every time they got closer, Google would tell the world they weren’t ready to get rid of them just yet.
Google had decided to deprecate cookies amidst cries from international government entities and consumer advocacy groups that cookies are an invasion of privacy, tracking personal information about them that they may not even realize is being tracked. But as Google moved closer to deprecation by exploring concepts like a Google Privacy Sandbox, new fears arose from the EU and Great Britain that this deprecation would actually lead to an unfair impediment for the digital advertising industry, which is largely reliant on Google’s third-party cookie data to be successful.1
In this blog, we’ll explore how marketers and advertisers use cookies, how they help or harm consumers, how companies have been preparing for a cookieless world, and now what?!
How Cookies and No Cookies Impact Consumers
Google’s cookies track various data about a person as they use Chrome to meander through the Internet. A cookie, this tiny little pixel, drops onto your browser and collects information about your likes, dislikes, and interests, feeding that information back to Google. Google can use your personalized data – across millions of users worldwide. Fears have arisen, in the US and internationally, about what exactly Google knows about consumers based on their surfing history and how that data is being used.
The decision to retract cookie depreciation directly impacts consumers’ ability to limit the data that Google can collect about them, store, and use for advertising purposes. Arguably, it also gives Google a deep understanding of consumers’ shopping habits, interests, and personal affiliations. As a consumer, you may not want Google to have access to this information nor have the ability to leverage it for the purpose of making itself money.
Consumers shouldn’t be overly concerned, though, as Google is planning to offer them control over their browsing experience and will likely give consumers an opt-in model presented by Google’s Privacy Sandbox VP, Andy Chavez, in his recent blog post on the matter.2 The new opt-in experience will apply across Google’s web browsing experience and provide control to the consumer. However, Google will be working through the details of this with regulators and the digital advertising industry before rolling this out to consumers.
The bottom line is that if you’re a consumer, once this rolls out, you should have more total control over what is shared back to Google and advertisers.
How Cookies Impact Advertisers and Marketers: How it Started, How it Was Going, What Now?
How it Started
If you’re a digital marketer or advertiser, up until 2020, you could not have imagined a world without cookies or one with COVID-19 (had to do it- sorry!). Cookies were like crack for digital ad geeks like us. Cookies allowed us advertisers to precisely target our prospective customers, serving ads up to people at the exact right moment to get them to buy new sneakers, book a cruise, or make dinner reservations. When Google announced cookie deprecation, we cried, complained, commiserated over virtual martinis, and bemoaned why Google had to make life so hard.
While the big agencies and industry self-governing bodies, like the IAB, were engaged with Google and looking at ways to deprecate cookies to meet regulatory concerns worldwide, smaller boutique agencies, companies, and enterprises went about their business squeezing every drop of third-party cookie data that we could while we still had it! We were preparing for the future but were happy that Google kept extending the deadline.
What Shifted in 2020 and Since
What it forced us to do was to start to really think about and put meaningful strategies in place with clients to acquire first-party data. Data that businesses could own, with consumer consent, to use for ongoing marketing and advertising purposes. This was a turning point for the industry, in my opinion. While companies already had some form of first-party data collection, Google’s deprecation announcement in 2020 made it a must-do for companies, whether they wanted to or not. It forced marketers’ hands to dig into deeper, more meaningful content strategies and promotion strategies and think harder than ever about how their brand could build a real relationship with their audiences. At the same time, the funnel was also drastically changing as we all adjusted to life at home. Consumers were on their devices more than ever before and wanted a seamless experience from device to device – which is largely facilitated by, you guessed it, cookies! So what to do?! For starters, we rethought the consumer-brand relationship in new ways, asking ourselves how our brand can provide meaningful content that consumers will want to keep seeing and will actually be willing to exchange their personal information to get. Second, we kept using cookies for robust targeting within our ad campaigns, while we built those first-party databases as fast and furious as we could for our clients.
What Now? The Future is Bright But Still Uncertain
Now that cookies are not going away, we breathed a tremendous sigh of relief. Consumers will have more control, and, yes, some consumers will exercise it. For cookies to remain a useful tool in marketing and advertising strategies, I think it must boil down to intense consumer education while keeping it as simple as possible – an oxymoron – I know. And marketers need to continue to focus on providing value to customers and not make a mess with the cookies. But that’s the only way I can see this working out to be equally beneficial for consumers, advertisers, and, of course, Google. Google must play a key role in educating consumers to ensure they are fully informed about the pros of opting into cookies across their browsing experience.
At the end of the day, the way I always explain it to people is, why wouldn’t you want the most personalized browsing experience possible? The more data you give up, the more your browsing experience will be filled with relevant content and, yes, relevant ads across devices. Imagine the difference in targeting a middle-aged woman for facials and skincare vs. a teenage girl – very different needs and messages. As a middle-aged woman, I certainly don’t want to hear about skincare for a 16-year-old girl. And I also don’t want to be targeted for products and services that are outside my budget or that I wouldn’t value. Cookies allow advertisers to put the right ads in front of the most relevant audience at the right times. Consumers benefit from this if they understand how it works.
The Continued Importance of First-Party Data
In the long term, we’ll want to continue to focus on acquiring first-party data such as email addresses, physical addresses, and mobile phone numbers to build deeper relationships with our audiences and serve up the most relevant content and ads to them. That’s not going away, and the need to stoke that fire with relevant content is burning hotter than ever.
When Google does unveil its full plan to roll out a new version of cookies, as an agency we’ll be closely guarding our clients’ budgets and ad performance. “One of my concerns, when the time comes, is how consumer opt-outs may cause our qualified audience pools to shrink,” said Josh Barwa, Bullseye Strategy’s Vice President of Media Planning and Buying. “Shrinking audience pools can often result in reduced efficiencies in digital advertising. We’ll recommend more tests to assess the waters before jumping into the deep end.”
To wrap up, this is definitely a developing story, and we’ll continue to update the blog and our socials with our POV and how we’re addressing this for our clients.
If you have questions or you’d like to discuss how Google’s reversal on cookies will affect your business, contact us here.
1 Forbes, Google Commits To Third-Party Cookies Deprecation In 2024 https://www.forbes.com/sites/forrester/2024/01/16/google-commits-to-third-party-cookies-deprecation-in-2024/
2 Google’s Andy Chavez Blog Post, A new path for Privacy Sandbox on the web, https://privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/news/privacy-sandbox-update/
