3rd-party Cookies

Despite their seemingly innocent name, cookies have found themselves at the heart of one of the internet’s biggest privacy revolutions. Specifically, third-party cookies have come under fire from privacy-advocacy groups, ultimately leading Google to work towards a cookieless future. This change will have significant implications for advertisers, as third-party cookies have been an essential targeting technology since their inception.

Let’s dive into the implications of Google’s decision and how you can prepare for the cookieless future.

The cookieless future is fast approaching, and this means that brands need to rebuild their marketing strategies around alternatives to third-party cookies. Navigating this new environment will require mastering a suite of tools, including another type of cookies: first-party cookies.

To understand how you can make the most of first-party cookies, let’s dive into what they are, how they work, and how advertisers use them.

This article aims to complete the round of quality tests performed on the sampled Seller-Defined Audiences signals we received from the sell side. While the previous article investigated contextual SDAs, this one will focus on user SDAs and verify how they reflect reality. The tests in this section varied from the ones performed on the contextual signals as the nature of the user type differs. The first test relied on a manual check of an assignment mechanism, while the second one was based on a survey campaign.

It might have been delayed, but the end of third-party tracking cookies is coming at the beginning of 2025, and businesses can’t afford to keep pretending otherwise. The good news is that thanks to this delay, there is still a small window of opportunity for companies to prepare for the cookieless future by engaging with the Google Chrome Privacy Sandbox.

Have you heard of Seller-Defined Audiences (SDA) yet? SDA was released at the beginning of 2022 by Project Rearc – an initiative that came to life as the IAB Tech Lab’s answer to the impending demise of 3rd-party cookies. Although a year hasn’t passed since its release, SDA has received significant attention in the press and industry conferences and is considered one of the go-to solutions for targeting when the 3rd-party cookie pond dries up.

In this Cookieless Newsroom, you can read about the recently announced third postponement of the third-party cookies deprecation, the freshest Privacy Sandbox commitments report by CMA, and more cookieless topics.