The prospect, though, could fundamentally change the marketing industry. I’m facing a lot of questions from my clients about what that could look like. Here’s what I’m telling them.
Forget what you thought you knew about tracking’s future. As marketers, we were planning for a future of severely weakened cookies and, eventually, no third-party cookies, but now the timing is up in the air.
In the uncertainty, moving to a first-party cookie tracking world still makes the most sense as it works in all future conditions. The worst-case scenario is you improve your tracking; in the best-case scenario, you are prepared for one of the biggest changes in digital marketing’s history.
Tracking might get easier; it might get much worse; I expect it to continue eroding for marketers who don’t take action by moving to server-side tracking. We don’t really know the future -- and it becomes less clear than ever if Chrome changes hands.
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Watch search habits like a hawk. With Google’s Chrome advantage gone, search habits are already in flux -- with many users moving search to LLMs -- and will likely change even faster. The massive shift away from traditional search will be exacerbated if the search market is splintered while there is also a consolidation in AI around the top LLMs.
This will have lasting and hard-to-predict impacts on the entire web. Chrome won’t go away; someone else will own it. It will still be the largest browser by market share.
We will all have to trust that the eventual buyer can improve the web in similar ways that Google has over the past 16+ years since launching Chrome. Web standards have consolidated as the browser market became more concentrated, which has made it easier to manage things like site speed and load times (which have huge impacts on SEO). Chrome under new ownership represents a fragmentation risk.
Keep an eye on Android. Right now Chrome is in focus, but if the ruling morphs to incorporate Android, all Google’s big bets on app install campaigns will go up in smoke -- which will open up lots of growth for other networks.
For advertisers, we’d gotten to a point where the app marketing landscape was pretty well covered: Apple Search Ads for Apple App Store searches, Google App Campaigns for Play Store searches, and Meta, as the largest social media channel, filling in the gaps. Any Android sale will result in more fragmentation and a loss of momentum and clarity for app marketers. The app install space has historically been messy (particularly in the wake of iOS 14), and it could get worse if Google and Android split.
The good news? I doubt any of this will happen soon. Marketers need to pay attention to the headlines and dive in when things start getting serious, but for now, our energy is better spent on more immediate developments.