Let’s travel back to 2020. GDPR is just two years old, and the world is ready for a more privacy-conscious internet. Google has made waves by announcing that as of 2022 third-party tracking cookies would be deprecated in its Chrome browser. The digital advertising ecosystem is in uproar. Google’s cookie announcement has given advertisers and publishers just two years to prepare, with everything from personalised marketing to ad-funded content on the line.
Half a decade later – half a decade! – and Google has, after pushing the deprecation deadline back time and again, announced that tracking cookies will not, after all, be going anywhere. Even Google’s plans to give consumers more of a choice with an opt-in prompt are up in smoke. Five years of planning and investment on behalf of publishers and advertisers are seemingly all for nothing. Google is keeping cookies.
How will Google’s cookie announcement play with consumers?
However, despite the Google cookie reversal, publishers, agencies, and advertisers can take heart in the fact that the fundamentals of a privacy-centric internet are still in place. Google is not, after all, the only browser in town, and companies including Microsoft Edge, Apple, and Mozilla have already taken steps to limit cookie usage and provide consumers with greater control. Even in Chrome, users have the option to delete, allow, or block cookies if they know what to do.
Putting an end to cookies is clearly in consumers’ best interests, and it’s also what they demand. Survey after survey, poll after poll, shows that consumers demand privacy preserving practices, and are willing to reward companies that provide this to them.
To get a flavour of some of these statistics, consider the fact that 85% of global adults want to do more to protect their online privacy and that 73% of consumers are more concerned about their data privacy now than they were a few years ago. Consider also that 87% of consumers won’t do business with a company if they have concerns about its security practices and that 67% have decided against making an online purchase because of privacy concerns.
Clearly, the google cookie reversal is going against the tide of consumer demand. Brands and publishers that continue to use invasive tracking cookies do so at their own risk. Most understand this and are looking to pivot to privacy-centric alternatives, such as using consented first-party data and IDs. In fact, first-party data now plays a key role in 64% of publishers’ ad strategies.
How does Google keeping cookies impact match rates?
Another reason why brands and publishers are looking beyond tracking cookies is the simple fact that they are are ineffective.
Take match rates as an example. Match rates are a key metric in programmatic advertising, showing what percentage of a brand’s addressable audience is being reached with its content. A high match rate indicates that content is being delivered to a large, relevant audience – those most likely to engage. This makes match rates essential for ensuring efficient, targeted reach in digital campaigns. However, adtech that uses third-party cookies to match audiences can result in brands losing millions of dollars due to low match rates of around just 31%-45% on average.
Many of the alternatives now available can provide much greater accuracy. With telco-verified IDs, for example, publishers and brands can activate their own first-party data using telco-verified intelligence to build scalable identifiers. As these IDs are 100% verified at source, they enable intrinsic, large-scale matching that is secure and privacy compliant.
The Google cookie u-turn will not slow privacy innovation in adtech
In the final analysis, the past five years’ work on the part of publishers, brands, and adtech businesses have not been wasted. Believing cookie deprecation to be imminent, the digital marketing industry has been innovating alternatives that better meet consumer demand for privacy-preservation while also delivering better match rates for brands’ specified addressable audiences. As a result, even as Google makes a retrograde step with its cookie reversal, the rest of the industry is looking forward to a privacy-centric world where advertising ROI is more readily achievable within a programmatic system that is better able to deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time.
Third-party cookies may be here to stay, but they are increasingly irrelevant.
