First-party Cookies

In January 2020, Google announced that it will end support for third-party tracking cookies in the Google Chrome browser “within two years,” signifying major changes for retargeting Google Ads. In June 2021, this timeline was extended to 2023, June 2022 brought yet another extension to the 2nd half of 2024, and in April 2024 it was postponed to the beginning of 2025. Moreover, Google Chrome declared withdrawing 1% of 3rd-party cookies in Q1 2024 to provide a reliable environment for testing.

Other browsers, such as Safari, Firefox, and Edge, have already stopped supporting 3rd party cookies for retargeting ads. But from the marketer’s point of view, the fact that Google will also follow this trend for retargeting Google Ads is important due to Chrome’s over 60% market share. Therefore—how will retargeting work without cookies?

We now know that third-party cookies will be staying with us a little longer. On June 24, Google released an updated timeline for the Privacy Sandbox – a high-level plan indicating that it will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three month period starting mid-2023.

The question is – how much more time does the industry actually have? The answer is – not much. Based on the official procedures for bringing new features to Chrome, we at RTB House expect that the next two years will be filled with work.

The digital marketing landscape is a very complex environment. There are many players with different profiles of activities addressing the diverse needs of their clients.

Over the past two years, the entire advertising industry has been lively discussing the impending deprecation of third-party cookies and its implications for each side of the ecosystem. There are countless articles outlining the general concept of Google’s Privacy Sandbox and its alternatives, as well as assumptions on what will happen to the industry as a whole. However, when it comes to frequency capping – one of the most important tools for both publishers and advertisers, and arguably the least controversial one privacy-wise – there is not enough media coverage, apart from some calls to address the topic.

Everyone loves a good challenge, but some are tougher to tackle than others. For marketers, the big one is the personalization paradox. 71% of consumers prefer personalized ad content, but 74% are also concerned about how advertisers are actually using their personal data. This creates a problem for marketers. They want to reach out to their customers with personalized content but often rely on tracking technologies that are considered invasive. Fortunately, there is an answer to this particular paradox. Brands can use data-driven strategy to leverage large anonymized datasets that provide rich personalization at scale without compromising on privacy.