Google turns off cookies for 30 million Chrome users - Will your ads survive?

Austin LeClear

Jan 12 in 💬 General discussion

Google just turned off third-party cookies for 30 million Chrome users - and that is just 1% of the users!

The plan is by Q3 of this year to phase out third-party cookies for 100% of Chrome users.

You might have seen articles or emails already talking about this and most them are very doom and gloom.

But how worried should you really be about your Google Ads performance?

Well...I have good news.

Julius Fedorovicius from Analytics Mania summed it perfectly in one of his emails (copy and pasted below)

In short - you don't need to be concerned at all!

I wanted to share Julius's thoughts on this since it is a no BS response and I appreciate that and hopefully you will too.

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Julius's Email on Google phasing out third-party cookies:

Don't listen to the "Cookieless" fearmongering

Your social feeds are probably filled with posts and articles about Google starting to phase out 3rd party cookies. Together with that, I still see a lot of misleading or simply false "thoughts" and click baits.

I also saw a bunch of respected names in the industry trying to demystify some false claims. Thank you.

However, I still get questions about what you should do about this phase-out of 3rd party cookies.

So here's a quick summary of what is happening (I will not go too deep because I don't want to make this email very long): "Cookieless" term is bullshit.

Cookies still remain, and your Google Analytics does not break.

This phase-out is related only to 3rd party cookies (which are used for cross-site tracking and remarketing).

1st party cookies (they are set on behalf of your website domain) remain. Google Analytics 4 is using 1st party cookies. Google ads conversion tracking uses 1st party cookies (plus, Google and FB keep pushing more drastic solutions, such as enhanced conversions where you send hashed user information to Big G). Facebook Pixel is using 1st-party cookies, etc. I mean, things like FB are also using 3rd party cookies. But 1st party cookies are also part of the equation.

What should you do about the phase-out of 3rd party cookies? Not much. That is Google's, FB's, and other vendors' headache now. They will probably rely more and more on AI and data modeling, hashed personal information of your visitors (that you might be sending to them), there are still some experiments running related to Privacy Sandbox, etc. Time will show what will happen. And when more is known, trust me - there will be a buzz in the industry, and you will be informed.

But is there anything specific you must do now? No. If there were some specific steps for a solid workaround, don't you think that Google, Facebook, and others would have already bombarded you with emails and notifications? Remember how much we were bombarded about the GA4 migration last year? Yeah. Things are fairly quiet now because there is no single magic bullet.

And if you see someone saying that server-side tagging is THE solution to the phase-out of 3rd party cookies, slap them. The whole point of server-side tagging is to give you more control and power in the *first-party context*. Not a third party. Sure, businesses can send user emails, names, etc. to ad-tech vendors to make their targeting and tracking more precise. But that can be done even without server-side tagging.

</rant>

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