With cookies going away, marketers are now going to be faced with an identity problem within their entire technology stack above all else.
Many of these platforms (testing, customer analytics, attribution, etc.) are moving to using a customer provided ID or providing a customer ID back to their clients when someone arrives on a site or experience, but how do you begin to store all of these various IDs and continue to enable a common use case like personalization? Move beyond the cookie. They’ve leveraged first-party cookies to enable testing and personalization of users on websites.īut now that first-party vendor-set cookies only last for 1 day (on Safari), they can’t continue to link an experience or a test if someone arrives 25 hours after their first visit. Think of many popular personalization platforms like Optimizely, AB Tasty, etc. Many of the companies in the latest marketing technology landscape leveraged cookies to maintain the identity of the user on websites. Companies have built billion dollar businesses off the management and application of these cookies, which are now going away (partially), and there will be broad implications for those that can evolve quickly. To understand how this is going to impact your organization and what you should be thinking about and doing right now, you need to start with a fundamental understanding of the role that cookies played for marketers over the past decade– and with cookies removed, what are the broader implications? The Cookieĭigiday does a great job of describing the different types of cookies that marketers have been using to better understand their site visitors, track them, and record how they’ve interacted with them, but I like to use a simpler explanation:Ī cookie is a means of managing identity for companies without having you (the consumer) having to actively provide data.Ĭookies for a long time have been the easy button for marketers, allowing them to push the management of identity to their technology and publishing providers. There is a lot of talk about a mass exodus from the chrome browser because of that, but we will see if that actually happens Privacy is in the spotlight, and if Apple has anything to say about it, it will only continue to gain in prominence, especially with their recent ad campaigns.
Google has all but killed FLoC, saying it needs another look, and UID 2.0 is going to need an independent operator if it wants to stay onside of the CMA (UK Competition and Markets Authority), along with a timeline to get out of beta.
Glass half full or half empty, it’s still half of your audience which doesn’t have the life of cookies being extended until 2023. Most MarTech platforms leveraged cookies to maintain identity and are redesigning identity management in their platforms.
Cookies aren’t just about advertising.But after taking a few days to consider the implications, this change is going to do more harm than good. When Google Chrome announced on June 24th they’d extend the life of Cookies within Chrome until 2023, my initial reaction was that this was going to be great for advertisers as it gives them more time to prepare for the change. In my last article – “ Now that Google has drawn a line in the privacy sand(box), what’s next?” – we explored the implications of the death of the 3rd party cookie with the deadline set in February of 2022 and what those implications were to Marketing, Analytics, and Customer Experience teams. channel, causing breaks in the way that identity is handled and fracturing sales funnels. Marketers will be left managing consumer interactions by browser vs.
While ad-tech may not have been ready for Chrome to turn off the cookie, the rest of the ecosystem is going to continue to struggle as Safari and Firefox continue to enhance their privacy controls for consumers. Marketers and analytics professionals are going to be faced with more problems than solutions from this update. TL, DR : Google has delayed the death of the 3rd party cookie in Chrome until 2023 in an announcement on June 24th that extends the life by almost 2 years.