Google Delays Deprecation of 3rd Party Cookies

Lannie Byrd, chief operating officer at MHP/Team SI, discusses the latest news from Google announcing the delay of removing third-party cookie tracking.

Update: Google has once again delayed the depreciation of 3rd-party cookies, this time until late 2024. Learn more here.

We keep bringing you updates on the latest on what’s going on with marketing, and specifically, we’ve had a lot of conversations about user identity and third-party cookies, and Google and Apple and Facebook and what they’ve been doing with third-party cookies.

Well, the big news this week is that Google is delaying its deprecation of third-party cookies from its original date of January 2022 until at least late 2023.

Remember, third-party cookies are just one of the many identification methods used online to help target users.

We are seeing similar privacy moves from Apple, Safari, and Facebook, and even Google is doing the same thing on their Android smartphone, taking away some of the keys we have to be able to tell who someone is online and targeting them with ads.

Now, Google has announced that they will slowly phase out their Chrome web browser’s ability to accept third-party cookies over a three month period in late 2023. The latest stats show that Chrome holds about 65% of the web browser market overall, so it’s a significant move for Google.

The big deal is that this was supposed to happen in January 2022, and now it’s happening almost two years later — 18-months to two-years later, they’re not really sure.

Google has also told us that they’re ending their FLoC trials, which was basically a new method for targeting users within their Google Privacy Sandbox on July 13th. 

Now, there’s a lot of reasons for this. One of them is that the ad industry isn’t ready, but the big one, though, is that, in Europe, with the European Commission and in the UK, there’s a lot of anti-trust trials going on and lawsuits, basically where people are claiming that it is unfair for Google to own both the browsing platform, Chrome with 65% of users worldwide, and the ad serving platform Google Ads which include AdWords, and different components, Double-Click that they’ve put together in their Google Ads platforms.

So, most of these delays are really coming from the anti-trust lawsuit pressures.

The real question for you and me is “what do we do about this delay for marketing and reaching out to our own consumers?”

Here’s what we’re going to do at MHP/Team SI. We’re really going to hold the course of what we’ve been planning on doing. We’ve been testing out new methods and ways of identifying people online — whether that’s identifying them with first-party data, implementing CRMs, or other things like that. We’re going to keep doing that.

Google’s change actually gives us more time to react, but as with everything online, and data targeting methods and platforms, and user behavior, it’s always changing. It’s always something new.

Change is the biggest constant in the marketing world today.

Here at MHP/Team SI, we really approach change in a methodical, data-driven way, allowing us to experiment with a variety of different methods and platforms to develop new best practices to implement for all of our clients.

If you want to have a deeper conversation about how all these changes from Google and Apple and Facebook really mean for your business’s marketing, we’re happy to engage with you. If you’re a client of MHP/Team SI, your account team should be bringing these up and discussing this with you. If you’re not a client, and you want to learn more about what these changes mean for your business and actually how you can take advantage of those changes, we would be happy to go ahead and have that conversation with you and start planning how your business can grow throughout these changes.