Third Party Cookie Deprecation in Chrome
POV on Third Party Cookie Deprecation in Chrome
Last Updated: March 2024
Welcome to our comprehensive guide on navigating the evolving landscape of third-party cookie deprecation, particularly focusing on the imminent changes within Google Chrome. As the digital advertising industry braces for this transformative shift, understanding the implications and adapting strategies accordingly is paramount.
What’s Happening
Third-party cookie deprecation continues to be an ongoing process within our industry. Regulatory developments such as GDPR, CCPA, and, more recently, the DMA, alongside platform privacy solutions such as ITP and iOS 14 onwards, rightly give power back to the consumer regarding who obtains their data and what is done with it - yet they impact the ability to track and report marketing performance accurately.
In reality, cookie deprecation has been a part of modern marketing for over seven years. Apple made the initial privacy-first move in 2017 with its Internet Tracking Protocol on Safari (since then, it has expanded to iOS). Soon after, Firefox and Microsoft followed suit, leaving Chrome as the only browser with a significant market share that has yet to eliminate third-party cookie tracking fully. The traditional methods of tracking and identifying users for targeted advertising purposes have already been significantly altered.
The latest urgency surrounding cookie deprecation stems from Google’s deprecation of third-party cookies across 1% of its Chrome browser user base. This move marks the beginning of the last major browser to provide default permissions to third-party cookies. Google’s full rollout is underway and expected to be completed in Q1 2025.
Though the depreciation of 3rd party cookie tracking on Chrome may seem daunting, Jellyfish sees it as a crucial opportunity for advertisers to focus on efficient and effective deployment of 1st party data and quality conversations with consumers.
Implications & Realities
In the shift toward a cookieless digital ecosystem, there are a number of challenges top of mind for advertisers, but also some truths that we as an industry must acknowledge:
- Loss of Targeting Precision: Advertisers will lose access to some granular user data for targeting purposes. This makes it more difficult to deliver highly personalized ads to specific audience segments.
undefined - Attribution and Measurement: Traditional methods of attribution and measurement rely heavily on cookies for tracking user interactions across devices and channels.
undefined - Perceived Dependency on Walled Gardens: As third-party cookies become less reliable, advertisers may become more reliant on walled gardens like Google, Facebook, and Amazon for targeting and measurement, limiting competition and innovation in the advertising ecosystem.
undefined - Data Fragmentation: Advertisers must find ways to consolidate and integrate data from multiple sources to gain a holistic view of their audience, or face increased fragmentation of user data across different platforms and channels.
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Advertisers must face these challenges by exploring alternative targeting methods, investing in privacy-compliant solutions, and prioritizing user trust and transparency. A flexible consumer-focused approach will be key to success in 2024 and beyond.
How Jellyfish is Preparing Advertisers
We know this news can be scary, but at Jellyfish, we see it as an opportunity to elevate marketing efforts beyond legacy cookie-based targeting and measurement limitations.
Though we can expect a loss of control in terms of using third-party audience signals and diminishing pixels for retargeting, we navigate the changes and precipitate solutions with advertisers today, helping our clients take the following actions:
Analyze and benchmark
- Benchmark KPIs (cookie-based) against CRM and database information, alongside other metrics that will survive cookie deprecations, such as attention metrics, to understand the pre-and-post options and limitations for campaign optimization and applicable KPIS.
- Cognizance of previous attribution benchmarks relative to the modeled conversion solutions platforms are beginning to provide will guide our understanding of shifts in performance.
- Consider using platforms with a federated ID, such as UID 2.0. ID graphs like UID 2.0 allow for safe and private matching of email addresses between advertisers, publishers, and platforms.
- Leveraging in platform AI features to close the gap on lost targeting capabilities and maintain performance.
Explore Alternative Targeting Methods
- Contextual targeting allows for more organic conversations with consumers than the 'cookie bombing' strategies of old. Content that aligns with context is more impactful than chasing a cookie around the web.
- Lean into Walled Gardens and their platforms with a wide breadth of user data, such as Google and Amazon. This data is of higher fidelity than legacy third-party data and is often free.
Evaluate Current Measurement Stacks
- Conversion APIs can help improve the signal strength to the advertising platforms. Connecting your first-party sales data to a platform that relies on modeled attribution can significantly enhance the accuracy of those models and dramatically improve results and insights from reporting.
- Lean into MMM to change the conversation from attribution to contribution. Proven by time but challenged for innovation, Media Mix Models (MMM) are robust mathematical equations that infer the total influence of a channel's marketing spend on business outcomes. Historically slow to build and act on, advancements in machine learning and automation have spurred a revolution in MMM, such as Jellyfish's tool, Now Next Soon, which runs very granular models quickly, often, and outside black boxes.
- Google Analytics 4 will be the most robust solution for cross-channel attribution, but will be best used for click-driving website traffic-based media through its Data-Driven Attribution model. Advertisers should take the following actions now:
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Leverage First-Party Data
- Build out strong solutions for targeting and measurement that are durable in cookieless environments such as 1st Party Data and Unified ID 2.0.
- Experiment with "Clean rooms" such as Google's Privacy Sandbox and Amazon's Amazon Media Cloud to commingle your first-party data with trusted platforms and partners in a privacy-compliant environment.
Focus on Media Quality
- Work with third-party providers that measure attention through panel-based approaches to ensure creative is in environments where it can make an impression.
- Enhance approach to measuring upper-funnel impact, for example, elevating from View Through Rate to using site analytics or brand study data correlating video views with business results.
- Consider how content and context play a role in the mid and lower funnels by correlating media quality signals to brand affinity studies and sales.
- Curate a supply strategy of trusted publishers who reach the audiences needed but are free from clutter and poor user experience.
Stay Informed
We know we don't have all the answers - no one does. But in this case, no news is not good news. We promise to be as transparent as possible as we learn new information affecting media activation and measurement approaching our new reality post-2024.
For example, there is already news that the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is pushing back on Google's proposal for the Privacy Sandbox, a new set of privacy-safe targeting and measurement tools Google is developing. In this case, this regulatory body is not concerned with consumer privacy, but with mitigating competitive advantage in the industry, highlighting the complex and uncharted territory we will be navigating in 2024.
Jellyfish is committed to demystifying the digital world for its clients and driving custom solutions, together with them, that ensure we are not just preparing for cookies to crumble but seizing every opportunity to be more connected and consumer-focused than cookies ever allowed.