After Much Drama, Third Party Cookies May Be Here to Stay Afterall
It turns out third party cookies may be here to stay, despite Google having spent years preparing to end support of tracking cookies, essentially rendering one of the most-relied upon targeting tools for digital marketers completely useless. In response, professional marketers have moved on to other methods that provide more privacy for consumers, and several new tactics have proven to be quite successful.
Read More: Contextual Targeting
An article that broke this week from SearchEngineLand.com says governmental concerns in the UK and likely the EU are grinding Google’s plans to a rapid halt; plans that just finally got started after years of delays already.
The Upside of Third-Party Cookies
When used responsibly, tracking cookies can be very helpful. Positive uses include:
- Customizing experiences for consumers
- Pro-actively adding or removing consumers from targeting
- Making marketing smarter, so consumers aren’t bothered by unwanted messaging
If third party cookies may be here to stay, that’s OK. And it’s already been proven they can co-exist in the GDPR privacy environment with small changes.
They’ve never been a bad thing. There have been some bad actors who used them poorly, but cookies themselves are a great tool when used properly. We’ve always felt that Google, by ending support of cookies, was really just making a power move to claim and even tighter grip as arbiter of consumer data.
And this week’s article suggests governments feel the same way.
Read More: Alternatives to Third-Party Cookies
The Downside of Third-Party Cookies
As currently conceived, tracking cookies — like almost anything else in the world — can be used for nefarious purposes by bad actors. That’s been true from the start, and no matter what ends up replacing them will likely have the same drawbacks. There is no silver bullet.
Google’s move to end support of third party cookies has pushed a lot of “bottom feeder” marketing strategies — that are not consumer-friendly — to the wayside. Anticipating getting “cut off,” most of the bad actors have started looking elsewhere for soft targets.
In the meantime, it seems the threat of ending cookies was enough to force some real change in the industry. And that’s a good thing.
