The threat of a cookieless future has been looming (in the EU, at least) since 2016 when the General Data Protection Regulation was passed.

Google closing the circle of creating a cookieless browsing experience in will cause a significant shift in strategies, and could mean trouble for brands who rely heavily on third-party data for their advertising but aren’t prepared for it to be ‘switched off’.

According to a poll run by Insider Intelligence, these are the solutions that Advertisers claimed hold the ‘greatest promise’ in replacing third-party data.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small pieces of data that websites store on your device when you visit them. The purpose of cookies is to remember information about you, generally to learn more about you as a user and to personalise your website experience and the adverts you might be shown.

How will going ‘cookieless’ change things?

Currently, Chrome uses cookies to track users across multiple websites, and shares a lot of data with MarTech providers that could contain personally identifiable data.

Stepping away from this hyper-specific targeting is a welcome step towards data privacy for most people using the internet.

They get the best of both worlds - personalised ads with enhanced privacy - a win-win.

Adapting to a future without cookies

There are plenty of ways that companies can adapt to cookieless by switching their focus to collecting a diverse set of first-party data.

Arguably, this data is of higher quality, and if used properly it could produce better results.

1. Advertiser first-party data activation - collecting first-party data cuts out the middle-man and allows websites to get a much clearer picture of their audience. A few ways to collect first-party data include lead-gen forms, newsletter sign ups, customer surveys, and data tracking tools like Google Analytics 4 that can be set up to run without cookies with server-side tracking.

2. Google Topics - Google’s Topics API is a privacy sandbox. It enables interest-based advertising, but prevents advertisers using third-party cookies to track users across multiple websites or share this data with third parties. Instead, the API categorises a user's interests based on their activity, and advertisers use these interests to serve relevant ads. This is much more restrictive than cookies by design, as there are (currently) only 350 categories, preventing advertisers from accessing any personally identifiable data

3. Attention-based metrics - these are metrics that assess whether an audience is able to absorb the contents of an ad, and whether their interaction with an ad results in a meaningful interaction. This could involve eye-tracking which can be obtained through conducting in-depth studies, or other proxy signals like dwell time, click-through-rate, and scroll depth which can be gained through heat mapping softwares like Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity.

4. Social media advertising and targeting - social media platforms offer a wealth of knowledge about users, including demographics, interests, and how they engage with content. This data can be used to target similar users.

Consent Mode v2 marks a shift towards cookieless tracking

Google has recently updated their consent mode policies to conform with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). This is EU legislation, but they are making their policy applicable to the UK. This change supports a shift to cookieless tracking.

The first version of consent mode could send two signals from the website (via the cookie-banner/a Consent Management Platform), telling Google:

1. Does the user consent to their personal data being used for analytics purposes? (analytics_storage)
2. Does the user consent to their data being used for marketing purposes? (ad_storage)

Consent Mode v2 essentially adds two additional flags that signal:

1. Does the user consent to their personal data being used for advertising purposes? (ad_user_data)
2. Does the user consent to their personal data being used for remarketing? (ad_personalization)

Implementing Consent Mode v2 is a requirement of Google's updates policies. Without doing this, websites aren’t able to do remarketing or use enhanced conversions.

Google has said that if websites fail to comply with this policy, they may limit or suspend use of the Google product and/or terminate your agreement.

If you’re unsure whether your website is set up for Consent Mode v2, get in touch with our digital team.