Privacy Sandbox

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?

It’s time for the next part of our “Media Review” series. We take a deeper look at five pieces of content – including digital advertising analyses involving Apple’s ATT, a protocol for a privacy-preserving measurement, and the progress in Google’s Privacy Sandbox.

2023 has been a year of big changes for marketers. Artificial Intelligence tools like ChatGPT have transformed how many of us do our jobs, third-party cookies are on the cusp of being retired, and consumers have become more privacy-conscious than ever before. Despite the enormity of these changes, in many ways they’ve just set the scene for the big things to come in 2024. To understand what’s going on, we’ll briefly review MarTech trends in 2023, and then dive into the top MarTech trends in 2024.

We are already two months into “Mode B” testing of the Privacy Sandbox, with 3rd party cookies blocked on 1% of Chrome browsers worldwide. As part of our efforts to ensure the advertising industry retains effective tools without third party cookies, we have been actively experimenting with Privacy Sandbox tools. The results so far are encouraging, but there remains much to do.

Imagine a world without personalized ads. Brands would be forced to build generic messaging and throw it into the void, praying that it connected with someone. Customers would be less likely to find the products they actually want and forced to settle for whatever they happened upon online. Personalized ads help companies connect with people who actually want their products and save consumers from wasting their time on irrelevant content.

However, there’s a new challenge on the horizon. Consumers have become increasingly privacy conscious, and as an industry, we have had to find new ways to personalize our content to consumers while also respecting their privacy. This guide will walk you through personalized ads and how they will function as we move towards more privacy-friendly personalized ads.

We observe a confusion on the market regarding how changes to cookies will affect the user experience in retargeting. In this article, we will focus on the user’s perspective, starting the journey from the advertiser’s website through what is happening in the user’s browser, ending on the publisher’s website.