Have your cookie and eat it tomorrow too: the cookieless era got postponed or elevated, the user will now choose to be or not to be aggregated

The articles about trends in digital marketing in 2024 got it partially wrong again. No surprise here. However, the cookie armageddon has been so far avoided and marketers are not yet celebrating. Probably because they are expecting other zero-geddons such as the zero-click results expansion or SGE and the end of SEO as we know it. But let's enjoy a new season of BFCM and Holiday sales and worry about this later. Let's see how we avoided the end of the 3rd party cookie era so far.

How did the cookieless era get postponed and what's going to happen?

The start of the year got filled again with digital marketing trends announcing the end of digital advertising as we know it and the arrival of the cookieless era. Google postponed the cookie armageddon a few times since they first announced they will phase out the use of 3rd party cookies https://blog.chromium.org/2020/01/building-more-private-web-path-towards.html , but they were set to phase-out the 3rd party cookies on Chrome in 2024.

However, ta-dam! As they announced on April 23 2024 here https://privacysandbox.com/intl/en_us/news/update-on-the-plan-for-phase-out-of-third-party-cookies-on-chrome/ , this plan for 3rd-party cookie deprecation in Google Chrome was in the beginning postponed for early 2025, but no deadline has been set. Therefore digital marketers had a quite reasonable summer holiday.

Later on during a midsummer night's dream, Google announced officially that instead of deprecating third-party cookies, they are now aiming to introduce a new Google Chrome experience that would let people make an informed choice about their web browsing - you can read more in their official blog post here https://privacysandbox.com/news/privacy-sandbox-update . So as we say that a goal without a deadline is a dream, there we have it, dear digital marketers, the 3rd-party dream is still on-going and our cookieless nightmare is still postponed until further notice or until the regulators will agree to let the users consent to aggregation. We are definitely living the dream and we should be out there celebrating. Or setting and optimising campaigns for Q4 in a more cookieful reality.

Let's count our cookies and data from Zero To 3rd Hero

As there has been a lot of talk this year about zero-click results changing the future of SEO and zero-party data changing the future of advertising, I am sure many of you - especially the ones at the beginning of their digital marketing careers or the ones who don't do digital advertising for a living - got a bit mixed up in the counting of the cookies from 0 to Hero or from 0 to 3rd party, so allow me to try and shed a dim light on this cookie classification so you can better understand all the news and articles about the end or the beginning of cookieless or cookiefull advertising.

• Zero-Party Data - This is the data that the users are giving away to a business willingly by filling in forms, surveys and polls and letting the business now its preferences or their personal data. This can be anything from basic data like name and city of birth to content category preferences, any data the customers are giving us explicitly. It is very valuable data and it can be used in our campaigns to improve their performance and to predict what some potential new clients might be.
• First-Party Data - This is data we collect implicitly directly from the customers from their interactions with our web properties be it website or mobile app. Of course, the user needs to give us their consent so we can collect this data. As Google points out when talking about the need for implementing Enhanced Conversions, the higher volume of first-party data you collect from your visitors, the better their conversion modelling and automation is both in the Google Analytics 4 reports and their Google Ads AI-driven campaigns. Therefore it is of the utmost importance to make sure you have sitewide tagging via the Google Tag, Consent Mode implemented and Enhanced Conversions tags set up. I dare say this data is even more valuable in some ways than zero-party data, because this is the data that actually shows what a user does (the products they look at, the pages they browse, the products they buy) and not what a user says they do.
• Second-Party Data - This is the data the business has about customers or potential customers from other businesses. It may seem strange, but it is what happens when we share our personal information and preferences with a business and we sign for giving permission to that business to share our data with other business partners. And well, go figure, they actually do that sometimes. I would say this data is as valuable as first-party data. It is more expensive usually, but collecting zero-party and first-party data is also not effortless. As a business in its startup days it may be faster to revert to 2nd party data so it definitely is an option.
• Third-Party Data - Well, this is what the fuss is actually all about. 3rd party data is user personal data that is put together with other users' data and they are aggregated and shared with businesses as segments. The businesses that use the data have no ties to the business that collected the data and its users. But they get access to it and get to target these segments in their campaigns for example. They are generally used to serve users with personalised and well-targeted ads based on their browsing history, purchase history and general web and web properties behavior and interactions. I think an example is in order so let's say a user searches for on Google when logged into Google Chrome for a brown swimsuit. What usually happens afterwards when they swipe through social media feeds is that they will be targeted by brown swimsuits from various brands. This is the magic of 3rd party cookies and the magic we definitely count on as digital marketers.

The cookieless era got postponed, so what can we do for better results in our digital advertising?

Until further notice, as Google has other problems monopolising its attention span, what can we, the advertisers, do to better prepare for the upcoming cookieless era? We can still keep up the good (postponed) work and dig into collecting zero-party and first-party data from our customers. And of course, pray for more third-party miracles to come.