Dating back to 1994 cookie tracking originated as a solution to allow customers shopping on an e-commerce website to virtually store their items in a shopping cart. Today cookies are relied on for a variety of reasons including digital advertising. Cookie tracking enables companies to collect data such as customer preferences, locations, clicks. They are used as an advertising strategy to retarget customers that were previously on the website. As cookie tracking has shown to be beneficial for marketers, allowing them to understand their audiences’ interests and shopping habits, it has also been deemed as “dangerous.”
Many large third party networks may use cookies to collect personal data without explicit consent; causing cookie tracking to receive a bad reputation. When used for legitimate advertising and marketing purposes, cookies can give customers personalized ads that fit within their target purchasing history that can be useful. That said, where does cookie tracking stand today?
With Google announcing the deprecation of cookie tracking in 2024, marketers have been concerned with the idea of a cookieless world and the future of their strategies. Since users have demanded more privacy when scoping the internet, third-party cookies will slowly start to be phased out. This will affect those audiences who solely rely on third-party cookies collecting. Although this may seem to be a prominent concern for marketers, this gives them the opportunity to be innovative with their strategy. For example, utilizing first-party data or including email marketing in their plan.
The end of third-party cookie tracking has been announced and there have been several deadline extensions in the past few years. With a greater emphasis on first-party data, companies will need to focus on optimizing targeting campaigns to different audience generating tactics such as:
- Contextual targeting
- PMP targeting
- Retail media networks
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