Google no longer abandoning third-party cookies (what marketers need to know)

After years of trying to eliminate third-party cookies from their Chrome browser, Google announced in late July 2024 that they’ve decided to keep them running (for internet users who accept them), with a view to balance user privacy with the needs of the advertising industry.

Anthony Chavez, vice president of Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, wrote in a blog update: “We are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice. Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time.”

A refresher: what are third-party cookies?

Cookies are small data files which track user behaviour online. First-party cookies store information that’s generally helpful for enhancing a user’s experience. They’ll save login information, for example, or remember a visitor’s visual preferences (e.g. light mode vs. dark mode).

Third-party cookies, on the other hand, track user activity across multiple websites (often without consent, hence other browsers — like Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox — moving to ban them). Advertisers use this data to serve highly-targeted, hyper-specific ads.

The story so far: Google’s cookieless promise

In January 2020, Google announced their intention to phase out third-party cookies by 2022, but developing effective alternatives proved challenging, and feedback from industry stakeholders caused a chain of delays.

It was only in April 2024 — two years beyond their initial target — that Google announced they’d be delaying the sunsetting of third-party cookies for Chrome for yet another year, ‘til 2025. The July 2024 announcement extends the timeline even further, with no definitive end date for the discontinuation of third-party cookies set at the time of writing.

What now? The future of third-party cookies

Instead of eliminating third-party cookies, Google have opted to expand how users can control them in Chrome. This move aims to please everyone: ad performance will remain robust for marketers (who feared 60% reductions in advertising revenues), user protections will be improved, and policymakers enforcing privacy regulations will be appeased.

Google’s decision isn’t entirely surprising. It acknowledges the lack of a sufficiently-effective solution to replace cookies for tracking and advertising purposes. Despite Google’s efforts to deploy Consent Mode and alternative tracking mechanisms, they’ve yet to develop a tool that matches the efficiency of third-party cookies.

While the concepts that came out of Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative showed some promise, real-world effectiveness and industry adoption were shaky. Some publishers and ad executives expressed concerns about the limited testing scope of the Privacy Sandbox, which made it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about how well the alternative tracking solutions performed.

Google’s continuation of third-party cookies suggests that ‘modelled’ conversions in a ‘cookieless’ world don’t quite meet expected performance levels just yet.

What does this mean for users?

Third-party cookies will continue to track user behaviour across the web, but Google promise to roll out tighter controls and deeper transparency in their Chrome browser.

What does this mean for advertisers and publishers?

It’s a temporary reprieve for advertisers and publishers, giving them more time to prepare for future changes by developing new strategies for targeting and measuring without the immediate disruption that the removal of third-party cookies would have caused by next year.

This isn’t a permanent solution, though, and the industry will continue working on alternative technologies which comply with evolving privacy regulations and provide comparable levels of performance and accuracy.

Google, with their immense resources and influence, are likely to lead these efforts. But the broader digital ads industry will need to collaborate on finding viable alternatives.