Third-Party Cookie Deprecation
Update: Schiff, A. (2024, July 22). Google says it won’t deprecate cookies in Chrome after all (?!) AdExchanger.
I keep getting the same questions. Are you worried about third-party cookies going away? Are you planning for deprecation day? I am planning…a little bit, because I am not panicking. A meaningful chunk of the Web has been cookieless for years. Apple began limiting cross-site tracking in Safari with Intelligent Tracking Prevention. Firefox flipped third-party cookie blocking to default in 2019. Chicken Little cried, marketers adjusted, and the sky did not fall.
The push did not start with browser teams. These decisions weren’t conceived by the teams behind Chrome, Safari, Explorer, or Firefox. GDPR set a global baseline for consent and purpose limitation in 2018, and California followed with CCPA. If you buy media at scale, you are already feeling the effects in attribution windows, retargeting depth, and what it takes to prove incrementality. You’re adapting.
Google’s Privacy Sandbox emerged to keep some relevance and reach without handing every buyer a cross-site ID. Just recently, FLoC gave way to Topics, which keeps interest signals on device and shares a small window of recent topics with participating sites. These cohorts show what the open web will value when individual tracking fades: on-device signals, aggregation, and controls.
Here is my take, I do not expect Google to fully deprecate third-party cookies. The incentives run across both the demand and the sell-side, a massive supply source for Google. Google will not cannibalize revenue. If you are waiting for Deprecation Day, you will be waiting.
So, what actually changes for CMOs and marketers who want performance and proof, not cookie drama? First, invest in the identity you control. First-party data is your secret weapon. Second, plan for addressability, qualitative, and qualitative. Topics and Protected Audiences may sound useful, but they are not a replacement for a qualified audience strategy.
There isn’t always a single source of truth. Run always-on holdouts to quantify lift, refresh your MMM on a regularly, timely cadence, and use platform conversion signals as inputs rather than gospel. In the places where cookies persist, use them. In the places where cookies are constrained, emphasize contextual relevancy and frequency quality over sheer reach.
Supply deserves attention too. The Open Web remains a vast channel, leaning more on context, attention, and publisher audience segments. Diversify the buys that go into the pipes so you are not over-exposed to any single publisher. The privacy bar keeps rising, and the brands that treat consumer privacy as an asset uncover efficient growth over time.
The Web you buy will remain mixed for the foreseeable future; however, I might suggest forever. Put your dollars into identity, make testing the norm, and know that creative, when done with an audience in mind, will compliment the targeting strategy.
Sources
John Wilander, “Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.3,” WebKit, Sep 23, 2019. (WebKit)
Marissa Wood, “Today’s Firefox Blocks Third-Party Tracking Cookies and Cryptomining by Default,” Mozilla Blog, Sep 3, 2019. (Mozilla Blog)
Vinay Goel, “Get to know the new Topics API for Privacy Sandbox,” Google Keyword Blog, Jan 25, 2022. (blog.google)
European Commission, “Legal framework of EU data protection,” stating GDPR applies since May 25, 2018. (European Commission)