Chrome's deprecation of third-party cookies has been delayed by Google for another year. The phase-out will now begin in Q1 2025, giving publishers, advertisers, and web developers ample time to test and create viable alternatives.
What is a 3rd party cookie?
Cookies are small text files placed on your device by someone other than the website in which you are visiting. Cookies store data about you and the cookie owners can use this to show you more relevant ads in the future. You can consider cookies as the virtual token that digital advertising uses. They ensure ad dollars are spent intelligently.
But they also represent significant Privacy Risks, which is why the industry is trying to move away from cookie-based targeting.
What is happening to the Cookies?
3-P Cookies, which act more like an anonymous tracker of a user across the internet will be deprecated for good real soon. The timelines keep changing but all major browsers will eventually stop supporting this tech.
While Safari and Firefox are already there, with Chrome joining them in less than a year's time. with Chrome and all Chrome-based browsers doing so in early 2025.
What are the alternatives?
There are many alternatives in the Post-Cookie Browser world
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First and foremost is the First Party Cookie or Audience Data:
It's important to note that first-party data is here to stay. However, there are ways to make it more personalized. Websites already have access to a lot of user-specific information, such as login data, interests, and behaviour. By collecting consented data such as emails, phone numbers, location information, and behaviour signals, audience buckets can be created. It's important to obtain user consent when collecting this data. There are specialized solutions available to publishers, but the drawback is the scale - the larger the data, the more opportunities there are to analyse it and make it easier to monetize. -
Contextual Advertising:
Many publishers have experimented with contextual advertising, especially after complying with GDPR and CCPA regulations. This type of advertising involves analysing keywords and content to determine user interests and display relevant ads. It's particularly effective for websites that cater to a specific niche, such as soccer, movies, or gaming, as advertisers can easily target a specific audience. However, one disadvantage it has is scale and hence monetization.
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Identity Solutions:
There are many players in the ecosystem and all of these are trying to offer the most robust solution. While they all have their unique strengths, these are still reliant on the first-party cookie data which is then layered with Persistent Identifiers like email. A robust ID system has a major advantage over the other options as it can work across multiple websites, devices, and environments. As it relies on Universal Identifiers, it gives advertisers greater reach and insights which drives CPMs. Some of these include:
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Google Solutions:
As a primary voice in the digital advertising ecosystem (and also happens to own popular browser, Chrome), Google offers a few solutions:-
Google PPID: A Publisher Provided Identifier (PPID) is an identifier assigned to a user by a publisher which Google now allows publishers to share with advertisers, allowing personalised advertising in a privacy-compliant way. Find more here.
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Google PPS: Google Publisher Provided Signal (PPS) is a beta feature in Ad Manager that allows publishers to categorise their contextual data for programmatic monetization. Publishers using this solution can create segments using their first-party and contextual data which can then be made accessible to advertisers.
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Google Privacy Sandbox: This is Google's proposed solution to replace third-party cookies and includes a set of APIs; the Protected Audience API and most recently, the Topics API. These solutions are in active testing and so far the results have been far from satisfactory.
Read more here.
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Digital Fingerprinting:
Instead of relying on single identifiers, Digital Fingerprinting utilises multiple preferences and settings in apps and browsers to create a unique profile for each user. However, this method is problematic when it comes to privacy and compliance. More recently, browser owners such as Google, Apple, and Mozilla have announced that they will be limiting device fingerprinting on their browsers. -
Data clean rooms:
While in theory, these are very similar to first-party data and ID solutions, these allow both advertisers and publishers to share data with a third party, i.e. data pools or data clean rooms, where this data is matched with existing data-set that already exists. The advantage these offer is privacy. Since the data is never exchanged and rather merged in a larger pool, this option provides privacy and protection for both advertisers and publishers. As with other solutions, these also require scale making them cost ineffective and inefficient for a small or mid-size publisher.
Latest from Venatus
- We are working with a number of ID solutions and evaluating our strategies.
- We are also testing Google Provided Solutions and working closely with the Google team to ensure we are building the next generation of Privacy First capabilities, supporting both our publishers and advertisers.
- With our new tech stack, we aim to move a step further and start supporting more offerings as well as providing certain capabilities to our advertisers exclusively through our fully managed Premium offerings.
- As the Industry is very much in discussion and testing, we intend to support multiple Solutions and continue to test these well into the roll-out. Venatus publishers can expect 100% access and compliance whenever we have the confirmation dates.