No one will have missed Google’s latest announcement before the August vacations. After numerous postponements and announcement effects, Google has finally decided to give users the choice of whether or not to allow the use of third-party cookies on its Chrome browser. We seem to be heading towards an equivalent of Apple’s ATT, launched in 2021, which today has a refusal rate of around 80%. While the promises of the Privacy Sandbox are great, it will be impossible to regain the granularity of third-party cookies, which until now has been essential to targeting and addressability issues, particularly in acquisition and conversion strategies.
Without third-party cookies, the consequences are clear:
- end of cross-domain identification of consented Internet users: dependence on logged data
- end of first-party / second-party data reconciliation key: reduced customer / prospect knowledge
- end of precise targeting or retargeting: reach and precision threatened
- severely degraded performance metrics: lower ROAS* (*Return On Advertising Spend) visibility