Google Ends Its Plan to End Third-Party Cookies

The Five Most Key Takeaways from This Blog Post

• Digital marketers, sigh your sighs of relief: Google is indeed reneging on its years-long promise to nix third-party cookies.
• This should not be a terribly huge shock to the rest of the world, given the enormous importance that third-party cookies have in the field of digital advertising. (Advertising, it should be said, is the number-one source of Google’s revenue.)
• Since good relationships with advertisers form the basis of the majority of Google’s revenue stream, this back-down from the promise means that a number of Google employees will likely also be sighing sighs of relief. 
• There is, however, a hit that Google has to take from this back-down: many analysts and regulators asserted that Google’s plan to chuck out the third-party cookies in favor of a Google-created advertising system (part of the “Privacy Sandbox” initiative) would further serve Google’s dominance in the digital-advertising market, creating anti-trust issues. 
• The usual concerns about third-party cookies remain in place, among them concerns about data privacy that several past data breaches have demonstrated to be legitimate. 

Untightening the Lid on the Cookie Jar 

Remember when Google, huge tech company, said that starting in 2024 (i.e., the year this writer is writing this blog), that Google would begin its phase-out of third-party cookies? 

Well, fairly deep into this year, the company appears to have dropped the whole plan altogether. 

So for Chrome users, be certain that digital advertisers indeed will keep their hands in the cookie jar, gleaning from the digital cookie-crumb trail the information that will make it easier to identify on the individual level Internet users across web sites. 

(Of course, third-party cookies are still a thing on many other web browsers as well.) 

Slow Down, Please!–What Are Third-Party Cookies? What Do They Even Do? 

Third-party cookies are not physical cookies that you bring to or eat at the third party you go to in the course of a day, month, year, etc. Not that that was your assumption or anything. 

Nay, these are like little digital files (in the sense of like a detective’s file on a suspect) on you, an Internet user. The contents of these files concern the courses that you have taken while surfing the World Wide Web. 

For many entities that have a vested interest in delivering to individual Internet users particular information, some of which could lead the user to a purchase, third-party cookies allow for easier targeting of individuals. 

A term that you may see in association with third-party cookies is “microtargeting“, which refers to being able to deliver super-niche content to users that are in tune with those users’ interests. The web-browsing data that third-party cookies collect makes it much easier to microtarget.

Microtargeting comes in many forms, but the biggest one is advertising. 

Another form of information-delivery via microtargeting made possible by third-party cookies is political information, some of which may be worthy of suffix-ing with suffixes such as “mis-” and “dis-“. 

Yet another is the surveillance of Internet users, be they on watch lists or not. 

But since digital advertising is the primary concern of this article, we will go into that below. 

The Importance of Third-Party Cookies to Digital Advertising

Advertising of course is the first thing that comes to mind for many people. Third-party cookies make it easier to figure out the tastes and interests of users so as to craft and deliver ads for and to those users. 

That of course makes it easier to find the users most likely to respond to specific ads with a purchase. In advertising, the term “conversions” is used to refer to this ad-to-purchase behavior, which is the metric of interest here–i.e., it is the users’ purchase or non-purchase that is the ultimate metric of interest. 

The users themselves, which in the field of digital advertising more or less enjoy a personal identity comprised of all or just certain of their microtargetable interests and tastes and opinions and beliefs etc. gleaned through their online behavior collected by the cookies, supply advertisers with the means to the end that is a conversion. 

Consider how large of a boost the Internet has given to consumerist behavior by allowing consumers to purchase products in their pajamas and even receive the products in their mailboxes or on their front porches in a matter of weeks or days or, in some cases, the very day of purchase, perhaps arriving while the consumer is still wearing those pajamas. 

All that with a click, which, let’s admit it, can be quite an impulsive click at times. 

Considering how much easier it has become to “microtarget” consumers with specially crafted ads informed by third-party cookies, online advertising can be incredibly effective at getting people to click the “purchase” button. 

So for the time being, Chrome users will likely continue to supply advertisers with the “conversions” that third-party cookies effectively help facilitate.