Half-Baked: Are Third-Party Cookies Back on the Menu?

What’s Cooking?

After years of promising to kill third-party cookies, Google has announced a change in direction. Instead of removing them, Google will now let consumers decide whether to use third-party cookies or not.

Chrome users will soon have more control over their privacy settings and how they’re targeted online. Details are sparse, but one thing’s clear: you’ll have the final say on your web experience.

Anthony Chavez, Google’s VP of Privacy Sandbox, said this: “Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing.”

Why the Change of Heart?

Google has been experimenting with their Privacy Sandbox, but the results have been underwhelming. After submitting their findings to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) last month, Google identified a crucial issue: insufficient participation. The low testing volumes failed to replicate the true dynamics and incentives of the open web. To obtain meaningful insights, Google needs significantly higher user adoption.

What About the Privacy Sandbox?

Google’s not ditching the Privacy Sandbox. They will continue to invest in it, aiming to boost participation beyond the 1% of traffic that’s been tested to-date.

Chavez acknowledges the uphill battle: “We recognize this transition requires significant work by many participants and will impact publishers, advertisers, and everyone involved in online advertising.”

What’s Our POV?

At Demandbase, we’re ready for anything. Whether cookies stay or go, our diverse targeting technology has got you covered.

In B2B, we’ve always known our targeting and measurement would weather the cookie storm better than B2C. Our secret? Alternative signals that we’ve been perfecting for years.

While non-B2B DSPs focus on consumer signals, our B2B DSP zeroes in on content, context, and activating those signals for accounts and buying groups.

Here’s how we stay ahead:

• Cookies: We’ve never relied solely on cookies. We mix cookie data with content consumption signals and other IDs to see what people are researching and who’s interested in your product. That way, we never spend on someone we don’t know is in your account.
• IP-Based Identification: Our bread and butter. We map 3.7 billion IP addresses to ensure your identification strategy is solid. We’ll keep using our strong IP-based data along with additional third-party signals. Plus, we’re enhancing our Account Identification technology and AI-based modeling to guarantee top-notch intent data, even in a cookieless future.
• Identity resolution: We’ve partnered up with LiveRamp to integrate their cookie-less technology into our ad tech.  This allows us to connect emails, cookies, and other digital IDs into a single profile, giving us a complete view of consumer online behavior across all channels and touchpoints.
• Firmographics and technographics: Essential for targeting businesses and organizations directly, especially valuable in a cookieless future where individual consumer data is limited.
• AI-Powered Account Identification: Our AI matches IPs and cookies to accounts, ensuring our customers’ ongoing success. The account-level intent behaviors we gather feed our predictive models, driving accurate sales insights and alerts for sellers now and in the future.

What’s Next?

Questions abound, but we’re on it. We’ll keep tabs on Google’s updates and evolving consumer behavior to ensure you always have the best ID strategy.

With Google giving control to users, it will be fascinating to see how users handle their newfound choices. Stay tuned.