Be honest, how long have you been accepting those cookies when you go to a website? Does anyone know what a cookie is?

I’ll be honest…cookies seem nebulous, like bitcoin or offsides in soccer; we only know so much but then we leave it up to the people who seem to know what they are talking about as we hit “accept.”

Here’s the gist: brands have relied on cookies to track website visitors to enhance user experiences by tracking user behavior on a site and gathering that same user journey data for targeted advertising for when a user leaves a site. 

Whew.
A mouthful, I know.
Stick with us. 

This has been the status quo for brands and online marketing efforts for years. However, the landscape of cookie usage will undergo significant changes due to Google’s initiative to phase out third-party cookies in Chrome. Google has already implemented this change for 1% of Chrome users as of January 2024, affecting approximately 30 million individuals with browser updates that no longer support third-party cookies.

Are you not sure what the difference is between first-party and third-party cookies? See our chart below.

What does this mean for businesses and marketers relying on those cookies to remarket to customers? 

In a recent survey:

  • 41% of marketers express concern about their ability to track essential data.
  • 44% anticipate needing to increase their spending by 5% to 25% to maintain previous performance levels.
  • 23% plan to invest in email marketing software in response to Google’s new policy.

Chrome is not the first website browser to eliminate third-party cookies but they are the largest, forcing business owners and marketers to shift communications strategies that rely on other forms of data to get messaging in front of users. This shift opens the door for more contextual advertising in search engine marketing and tailoring ads according to the content of the web page rather than individual user actions. These methods honor user privacy while ensuring ads remain pertinent to the context with the added benefit of reinforcing best SEO practices. 

Identifying and adding relevant keywords and phrases related to your business and incorporating them naturally into website content, blogs and press releases all helps enhance your search engine optimization and helps improve search engine rankings for specific terms relevant to your brand or campaign. 

It is important to note that first-party cookies that track basic data about your own website’s visitors are still safe. This data includes information such as pages visited, products viewed, items added to cart, and other interactions with the website. Advertisers leverage this information to understand user interests, preferences and behaviors, which helps them deliver targeted and relevant advertisements. 

Knowing what data is available for your marketing efforts is important to understanding user behavior and creating meaningful and impactful messaging. So, as users, we’ll keep accepting those cookies until we no longer have to…as marketers it’s time to start thinking about other alternatives to that data. We marketed without the cookies before, and we can do so again.