• by Mark Andrews , Pranay Damji , September 24, 2024

It might have sounded like the best news of the summer: Google has officially scrapped its plans to ban third-party cookies in Chrome.

Despite the shock announcement, there were multiple reasons why the decision shouldn’t come as a surprise; the market still wasn’t ready despite the warnings, Google’s set of Privacy Sandbox alternative solutions were showing poor results in industry tests and competition authorities were still not convinced that the company’s approach wasn’t anti-competitive.

But just because the cookie isn’t being scrapped, doesn’t mean brands can afford to sit back. Even without an official ban, the cookie is still destined to turn from a triple chocolate Belgian luxury into a tasteless oat cracker.

One reason is that Google is planning to give users the power to consent to third-party tracking when they use the world’s most popular browser, Chrome. While this might seem harmless, factors such as the consent mechanism applied, the language used and users’ historical propensity to opt-out of such tracking means that we will likely see a significant to catastrophic drop in tracking ability.

For reference, App Tracking Transparency (ATT) by Apple – introduced in April 2021 – asks users via a pop-up if they would like to be tracked and indicates what data will be tracked if they accept. As of Q1 2024 only 50% of global app users opt into tracking (only 46% in the UK and 44% in the US). If these figures are anything to go by, it’s fair to suggest that a maximum of half the current users will opt-in of cookie tracking in Chrome.

Who’s most vulnerable

But while there will no longer be a widely publicized single date to work towards, change will certainly happen. Depending on how and when Chrome implements its consent mechanism, this might be a slow burn or a rapid shift. Regardless of the speed of change, brands cannot afford to do nothing.

Different brands inherently have different levels of vulnerability based on their business and marketing operations. The most vulnerable are brands that rely on cookies to manage performance and e-commerce. If you are tracking metrics such as cost per acquisition and cost per sale, for example, this is a serious challenge. If you are investing heavily in programmatic display and video on the open web, then you are also disproportionally vulnerable.

Less likely to be impacted are brands focused on offline sales, primarily using branding metrics such as awareness, reach, video completions and attention, as well as those buying search and social. Regarding programmatic, channels such as CTV, DOOH, YouTube, VOD and Audio are also generally less reliant on cookies.

It goes without saying that brands that have limited access to first-party data may inherently be at a disadvantage compared to those that have an abundance to access and lean on in the post-cookie world.

Plan now for competitive advantage

Google’s decision puts the onus on advertisers to implement the right strategies to maintain their marketing effectiveness.

Initially, that means not stopping internal efforts to plan for cookie replacement internally even if senior stakeholder execs, seeing the headlines about Google’s decision, no longer consider this to be a priority.

The first step is to carry out a bespoke assessment and understand the impact of cookie deprecation across your digital marketing operations, this will account for variables such as industry vertical, key KPIs, channel exposure and data availability.

The second step is to increase your ability to secure first-party data by assessing your value exchange with consumers. Find out if you need to offer more to consumers. Ultimately you want to maximize consent and get to a point where intentionally and proactively share their preferences or purchase intentions (also known as zero-party data).

Thirdly, continue to test targeting solutions so that you have a set of tools that can be called into action as and when they are needed. These should include contextual opportunities, publisher data, ID solutions, Google’s revamped Privacy Sandbox and curated marketplaces.

Finally, you need to measure what you are achieving and assess how you are maintaining marketing effectiveness and efficiency. That means implementing multiple measurement solutions including Media Mix Modelling (MMM), incrementality testing and multi-touch attribution (MTA).

MMM aids strategic decision-making, while incrementality validates MMM recommendations and insights through rigorous test-and-learn frameworks. Meanwhile, MTA provides daily optimization levers by using platform data related to campaign-specific KPIs.

The cookie debate has been going on for a long time. The truth is that brands have had plenty of time to get ahead of the curve and prepare for this change. They even have cookie-less environments such as Safari and Firefox to test the future landscape.

Google’s decision means now is the moment to grasp the challenge properly and get alternatives in place.