You know how the first time you visit a website there’s usually a pop up asking you to agree to cookies? This post will discuss what exactly cookies are, the future of cookies and what this means for your business.
Unlike the delicious chocolate chip variety, the cookies we’re talking about are digital pieces of information being collected as you browse the web.
There are two main types of cookies that we will concern ourselves with:
First-Party Cookies
and
Third-Party Cookies
First-Party Cookies are the pieces of data being collected and stored by the website you’re on. For example, let’s say you’re perusing shoes on DSW’s website. They may collect and track the pages you visit or the items you put into your cart in order to save that info for you at checkout.
Third-Party Cookies are collected instead by parties other than the website you are visiting. These are most commonly advertisers and social media platforms.
This is how you purchase something online and later see ads for that exact item while you scroll through your facebook feed.
Needless to say this type of targeted advertising is extremely valuable for marketers. Plus it could be argued that it makes the user experience more enjoyable showing you ads for things you actually like or care about.
Here’s where things get really interesting. Google announced it will phase out 3rd party cookies on Chrome in 2022.
The actual date for the phase out remains unknown as they have pushed it off a few times, but once they do, third party cookies will be blocked by all three major browsers – Chrome, Safari and Firefox.
So what will marketers do without this useful tool?
IP Address data is actually a useful replacement. We’ll talk more about this in a future post. In the meantime, learn more here.