Google is the latest to be getting rid of cookies - I Like Cookies 🍪
Google's phasing out of third-party cookie recognition in Chrome (by 2021) probably isn't the biggest surprise. The use of cookies to track online advertising has been under gradual attack for several years now. Firefox already does this and Safari clears a user's cookies every 24hrs. It was only a matter of time that Google followed suit and, indeed, the policy was hinted at as long ago as last August.
Many people won't be mourning the death of cookies. As a way of tracking people they're seen by many as archaic ad best and intrusive at worst. Google (as with Firefox and Apple) cites privacy as the primary driver behind its policy. But wait... if we're logged in to our Google account, Google is happily tracking away. And the ads that users see on websites... they're hardly going to go away. They'll just be less relevant. So...
Is getting rid of cookies actually a good thing for, y'know... the consumer??
Let's start with the way ads are served. If a user sees the same ad again and again, that's annoying. Frequency capping (limiting the amount of time an ad is shown to a single user) is one of the bread and butter basic elements of digital advertising. This is normally managed by a cookie being dropped on a user's system when an ad is served to them. Simple enough. Without cookies, this becomes much harder.
Repetitive ads become more common without effective measures to cap them.
Attribution is also a problem. Digital display ads often attempt to drive "awareness" of a brand or product. If a user acts upon having seen an ad, it may not be for some time... days or weeks, depending upon the product. Again, this becomes tricky in a cookie-less world. In this scenario, an advertiser may only be able to associate a sale or a registration to the final click a use makes, aka "last-click attribution" - a hugely limited view of the behaviour of a user.
Ads become less relevant without this information.
There are other ways to target ads without cookie information that gives them limited relevance, primarily contextual targeting (where the adserver scrapes the information a user is consuming and serves a vaguely relevant ad based on this information), but such methods do not compare to what is offered by traditional, cookie-based advertising.
As we all know, internet users hate the feeling of being "targeted". But I refute the notion that what the average internet user really wants deep down is less relevant ads, and more of the same ones.
So if getting rid of cookies doesn't make the internet a better place, why the purge?
If not Cookies, then what?
Cookies are not the only way that advertisers can serve and track ads in a bespoke manor. Another way to identify a user is via a login ID. Indeed, for an advertiser, a login, ID-derived system is better - users can clear cookies and, if a user has logged in to a browser, the owner of that login has a complete picture of everything that user has done online. This offers the advertiser far more information than a cookie ever could.
Did you think Google giving Chrome (and Android, for that matter) away for free was just them being nice? ;)
This is the truth of the matter behind Google (and Apple) eviscerating cookies from its browser. It forces advertisers to serve their ads via their data, for a fee. At present, a user is not obliged to log in to Chrome to use it, though most do. It has been speculated elsewhere that with this development that Google will mandate having to log in to Chrome to use it, but I'm not certain that this will prove to be the case.
From a PR perspective, abolishing advertising cookies is a great move. But the reality is that moving to cookieless solutions is ultimately going to increase the hegemony of the likes of Google even further.
I like cookies. 🍪
For more insight like this, check out www.sanders-media.com. Also, why not take a look at the FREE event I have organised on the basics of Paid Social and PPC? https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/how-to-use-social-media-ads-to-grow-your-business-and-understand-customers-tickets-93060024037