Quick Bite – Your 4-minute digestible marketing news!
Google has announced plans to kill off third-party cookies in Chrome ‘within 2 years.’ If you didn’t get full body chills at this news, can you call yourself a marketer? Google announced this change in attempts to make web browsing more secure for its users – a further step in their ‘Privacy Sandbox’ initiative. Google hinted this change back in November at their Chrome Dev Summit and alluded the move from cookies to ‘right sized API’s’ and machine learning.
To be clear, Google’s initiative isn’t new. Several rival browsers already protect its users using the announced methods. The reason for the hoopla is that Google is the world’s largest online advertising company. Its presence touches virtually every corner of the digital advertising sector, including buyers, sellers and the many intermediaries in between. Secondarily, Chrome is the web’s most popular browser. Reports claim it has 64% global market share.
In his blog, Schuch’s mentions Google intends on working with industry players to test how well its new cookie-less ad functions will perform by the end of 2020 using a cookie-less conversion measurement. A new, alternative tracking method, known as ‘fingerprinting’, will collect small characteristics of a browser (think – installed fonts, plugins, screen size, browser version) and uniquely identify the person using the computer. Unlike Cookies though, these fingerprints are harder to detect, and user profiles cannot easily be detected and categorized. Google’s strategy is to ‘re-architect’ the standards of the web and make it ‘privacy-preserving’ by default.
This announcement pairs with Google’s August blog post unveiling the ‘privacy sandbox’ proposed as a new set of web browsing standards. The specifics get very complicated very quickly so I will not bore you with the details. At a high level, the sandbox uses browser-based machine learning to determine user interests and aggregate them with other users. This new standard would give advertisers more relevant ads without allowing further tracking of the individual user.
While this news may initially scare marketers, it would behoove us to take a step back and think about this change holistically. Google’s much larger business serving ads would be mostly unaffected as it runs on first-party cookies. Additionally, while the ‘privacy sandbox’ is great in theory, it may stimulate browser innovation or encourage new metrics (think Triple Bottom Line type metrics). We have the opportunity to innovate and grow, we got this!
If you have the time, I would encourage you to visit the link below and read Schuh’s blog post for yourself. Exciting times in the kingdom!
Chrome Engineer Director, Justin Schuh’s, blog post about Cookie change – Visit here