22 Jun How Will Removing Third-Party Cookies Impact Digital Marketing?

The term cookieless future is becoming more well-known, particularly among digital marketers, but you may be wondering what it means for your business and future marketing campaigns. 

What is a Cookieless Future?

Third-party cookies are being phased out, due to privacy concerns and in order to create a more secure digital landscape. The changes will give consumers greater privacy and remove the practice of tracking them across the web without consent. The impact will change how online marketing campaigns track users, target advertising campaigns and generate new business leads. 

In short, it is a pretty big change to the way online marketing has been monitored and measured for many years. 

First-Party Cookies to Remain in Place 

For now, there are no plans to phase out first-party cookies. These cookies are less intrusive, as they only track user behavior on the specific website they’re generated from, instead of following a user across multiple websites. 

First-Party Cookies play an important role in improving user experience on websites, so from a business marketing point of view, how you track the way users engage and use your website will not change. 

Preparing For a Cookieless Future

Preparing for a cookieless future involves a layered approach. As we just discussed, first-party cookies are still allowed. Therefore, improving your first-party data collection is one way to still use cookies to gather valuable audience data. 

There are also methods that can be used to improve contextual advertising, or advertisers can consider alternate identifiers to learn about audiences. 

Ultimately, in the future, advertising strategies will rely less on third-party data for targeting and retargeting, and marketers will need to refine and maximize how well they use first-party data. 

Personalization and targeted advertising will still be possible in a cookieless future – just executed with different techniques and with more focus on user privacy. 

The tools and techniques we use to promote businesses online and capture new leads will change. However, the goals will remain the same. Reaching the right audience with the right message is still the number one goal for online marketing campaigns. If we can continue to do that but with greater levels of privacy for users on the web, everybody wins. 

If you would like help with your brand messaging, advertising, and digital marketing in Charlotte, North Carolina, to Seattle, Washington, and everywhere in between, get in touch with Visual Caffeine to learn how we can help you.