Monday, September 21, 2020

A cookieless future

In January this year, Google announced that it will phase out the support of third-party cookies in its Chrome Browser in the next two years. Just last week, with the roll-out of the Apple's iOS 14, Apple also announced that its Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) will be turned out by default in all web browsers starting next year. What does these two pieces of seemingly unrelated news mean for internet users and advertisers? It means that a cookieless future is coming to us at full speed, and advertisers need to be prepared before the "cookie-apocalypse" arrives. 

To recap, cookies consist of information that can be used to track users' visits and activities on browsers, and are therefore used widely by advertisers to track website visitors and re-target potential customers. With rising privacy and data protection concerns, the technology giants are rolling out these policies to protect user privacy, amongst other reasons. These policies have profound impact on the digital advertising industry, especially advertisers who rely heavily on third-party cookies to understand and re-target users.

What can advertisers do to be more prepared? One solution is to take better advantage of first-party data and become less reliant on third-party information. When users visit a shopping site, for example, there is an abundance of information that can be collected to learn about the products users browse, how long the users spend on each page, what actions they take, etc. All of these behavioral information can be used to build up user profiles which in turn can provide a better and more personalized user experience, which can be translated to more conversion. Additionally, advertisers can continue to innovate and come up with alternative solutions that can address the industry's need.


Links:

https://www.adweek.com/programmatic/apple-ios-14-cookieless-future-sooner-than-we-thought/?itm_source=parsely-api

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/third-party-cookie-phase-out


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