How has the Removal of Third-Party Cookies Effected Digital Advertisers? Part 1
Cookies used to be a highly effective digital marketing tool. Now that they are gone, what impact has that made on digital advertisers? Chrome and Chromium-based browsers stopped supporting third-party cookies in 2022, which effected everyone in the advertising industry. Traditional digital advertising and monetization methods have become less effective or even stopped working altogether as a result.
In this article, we explain why third-party cookies were canceled, how this will affect publishers and advertisers, and what you need to do now so that these changes won’t affect your ad revenue.
Why did third-party cookies go away?
Third-party cookies are online user identifiers that are set by a third-party platform or technology provider on the website the user is visiting. Cookies are stored on the user’s device. Brands have long used third-party cookies to track website visitors, improve user experience, and collect data to target ads to the right audience. The main advantage of third-party cookies for advertisers was that they enabled the tracking of what users were browsing throughout the entire web within a specific browser, not just on the site on which these cookies had been installed.
The third-party cookies cancellation is due to the users’ growing distrust of third-party cookies. The latter doesn’t allow the users to control where and how their personally identifiable information or PII is used.
“Users are demanding greater privacy—including transparency, choice, and control over how their data is used — and it’s clear the web ecosystem needs to evolve to meet these increasing demands,” Google announced in a blog post on March 3, 2021.
That’s also the goal of the data protection regulations created over the past 5 years (for example, the GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in California). One of their main purposes is to inform users about what data is being used and allow them to choose who to entrust their data to.
Although Chrome is not the first browser to disable third-party cookies, it has the highest market share at 64% of all users. Safari (ranked second) and Firefox (ranked third) stopped tracking users via third-party cookies over a year ago.
It’s worth remembering that not all types of cookies have been disabled. First-party cookies, which are created by the publisher or advertiser and are not transferred to third parties, will stay in place. Their purpose is to facilitate interaction with the user: remember passwords, search preferences, purchase history, recommendations, items saved in the cart, etc.