Potential Implications of Google’s War Against Third-Party Cookies

Google continues to fight its war against third-party cookies. In January 2020, the ad world reeled when Google announced it was going to phase out third-party cookies on Chrome as the search giant became more concerned about protecting consumer privacy. Google recently doubled down by announcing that the company will not build alternative tracking technologies -- or use those being developed by other companies -- for its own ad-buying tools to replace third-party cookies. In other words, Google will not build alternative identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, and Google will not use them in its products.  

So what does this all mean? Well, no one can say for sure, but a few points to keep in mind: 

Cookies Are Not Going Away Completely 

Google generated $147 billion in advertising in 2020, according to Alphabet’s 2020 10K. Google is not deleting advertisers’ ability to use all cookies. But Google is phasing out third-party cookies on Chrome, which means advertisers won’t be able to track users across websites on Chrome.  

Google Is Developing an Alternative to Third-Party Cookies on Chrome 

Google has developed an open-source program where businesses, using on-device machine learning, can group people based on their common browsing behavior as an alternative to third-party cookies. This is referred to as FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts). According to Google, “Our tests of FLoC to reach in-market and affinity Google Audiences show that advertisers can expect to see at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising.” That's pretty legit. 

Advertisers Will Still Rely on Google 

Advertisers wanting to play ball with Google won’t be able to retarget customized audiences with third-party cookies the way they used to. Instead, advertisers are going to have to rely on Google’s AI-generated audience segments via FLoC to target users. 

In a Nutshell 

• Google is not going to let go of $147 billion in annual advertising revenue, which is why Google is working so hard to figure this out. 

• It’s also too early to tell what’s happening and/or where we’re going. 

• We’re going to have to focus more on users and their needs and rely on Google’s assumptions of those users for targeting purposes. 

• Advertisers are also going to have to generate better ideas of KPIs and touchpoints based on the customer journey 

• And fine, let’s stop referring to cookies – let’s call them anonymized device/server-side processing to build audiences. 

All in all, we need to focus more on the user and their need at a moment in order to successfully measure the journey while respecting user privacy. This forces us to think more from the user's perspective and map KPIs and touchpoints based on the journey versus advertising to wider audiences and hoping to glean data from there. 

Contact Investis Digital 

We urge all businesses to take ownership of cookie management. And if you need a partner, contact us. Learn more about our technology solutions here. 

For Further Information 

“Charting a Course for a More Privacy-First Web,” David Temkin, Google, March 3, 2021. 

“Federated Learning of Cohorts — Google’s cookie killer,” Rafał Rybnik, Netlabe, February 5, 2021. 

“Building a privacy-first future for web advertising,” Chetna Bindra, Google, January 25, 2021. 

“Important Steps When Considering a Cookie Manager,” Stu White, Investis Digital, December 9, 2020. 

“Why Toxic Cookies Are Killing Your Reputation,” David Corchado, Investis Digital, November 18, 2020. 

“Building a more private web: A path towards making third party cookies obsolete” Google, January 14, 2020.