Google’s third-party cookie retention announcement is a gift to marketers willing to try something new
In its latest Privacy Sandbox update, Google has announced that it will no longer be moving forward with plans to deprecate third-party cookies on Chrome.
Following the announcement in April outlining Google’s intention to delay third-party cookie deprecation into 2024 that came amid growing pressure from regulators, the question on everyone’s lips was ‘is this the beginning of the end for third-party cookie deprecation on Chrome?”.
Well, this week we found out that the answer is, “yes”.
Headline-grabbing announcements are all well and good, but as marketers what we really need to know is how does this impact us, what changes do we have to make, and how can we use this as an opportunity to improve both how we measure success, and more broadly how we approach marketing growth in 2024?
Third party cookies remain, but only with user consent
The announcement from Google names user choice as a driving factor behind this decision, with the removal of third-party cookies not happening but users able to decide if they want their browser to serve a third-party cookie, or not.
Unlike consent banners on websites, this isn’t going to be a repeated action users will have to take every time they visit a website that wishes to serve them a cookie. Instead, Google will provide users with a simple informed choice that will subsequently allow or block across their web browsing, which can be adjusted at any time.
“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.”
Anthony Chavez, VP, Privacy Sandbox
Privacy Sandbox testing produces positive results
Despite the cancellation of the deprecation of third-party cookies on Chrome, Google have announced their Privacy Sandbox, the intended replacement to cookies, will continue to be developed and will remain available. Alongside the announcement about the decision to retain third-party cookies, Google have also announced preliminary results on Privacy Sandbox testing.
- Scale preservation: For advertiser spend- a proxy for scale – we saw an 89% recovery in Google Display Ads and an 86% recovery in Display & Video 360.
- Return on investment (ROI): For campaigns focused on conversions only, we saw a 97% recovery in conversions per dollar (CPD) – a proxy for ROI – in Google Display Ads, and a 95% CPD recovery in Display & Video 360.
- Remarketing recovery: Across campaigns using only remarketing audiences, our experiment showed a 55% advertiser spend recovery in Google Ads and 49% in Display & Video 360.
These results are good, but with only 1% of Chrome users available to test Privacy Sandbox on, the pool is too small to be conclusive. What we can conclude though, is that Google are standing firmly behind their Privacy Sandbox product and that the third-party cookie deprecation saga won’t detract from their desire to promote the product.
In our CEO’s own words:
“It is also clear from the deafening silence on the failure of their Attribution API to deliver anything close to accurate measurement with no viewability controls, that accuracy for marketers is not high on the agenda for Google, and follows in the footsteps of Google deciding to remove most attribution models from GA4, and then the recent, astonishing decision to reweight their only alternative to Last-Touch – their Data Driven Attribution (DDA) model – to boost apparent ROI from their own paid search product as ‘the “gclid” parameter (identifying the paid search click) doesn’t persist across page views’.
“So in Google’s own words: they can’t measure customer journeys across multiple sessions and therefore if someone changes device as they go through their consideration journey, they become a ‘new’ customer journey. The end result? Even with 3rd party cookies, their DDA model results end up looking not much different from Last-Touch and once again marketers are given an inflated view of the importance of Google’s Search Ads product and no ability to truly attribute converting journeys across their marketing mix.”
“The cost of free has never been higher for Google’s GA4 product for marketers.”
Chris Liversidge
Cookie deprecation cancellation as a growth opportunity
Third-party cookie deprecation has been a big topic in marketing circles, and the umming-and-ahhing from Google had left marketers confused and unsure about how they were going to market in a cookieless future. With this announcement, the status quo becomes the comfortable, easy option for marketers who aren’t keen to rock the boat, leaving a huge opportunity for growth ready for the taking.
Cookies are broken, and no amount of Google deciding to retain them is going to change that. Unable to handle complex user journeys, fundamentally non-compliant with the latest privacy legislation, and by their very nature driving spend to expensive bottom-of-funnel activity, cookies provide a promise of attribution that they entirely fail to live up to. The answer? Attribution driven by deep machine learning and AI.
Marketers who are willing to try something new have been gifted an opportunity to dramatically cut their CPAs, and drive up ROAS. What’s more with complacent competitors stuck battling it out at the bottom of the funnel where ad costs are high and CPAs keep rising, you can capture new customers before your competition is aware they’re even interested in your offering.
Trusted by marketers across sectors, Corvidae delivers 2-3x the length of customer paths compared to Google Analytics, deploying AI stitching to attribute the full customer path to conversion. With the ability to feed this information straight into your existing AdTech, the results speak for themselves, with a multinational online retailer finding the following results after onboarding Corvidae:
+89% ROAS (return on ad spend)
-46% CAC (customer acquisition cost)
-34% CPA (cost per acquisition)
Ready to leave your competition to fight it out in high-cost auctions and to see what results Corvidae can deliver for your organisation?
Book a demo with our attribution experts who can walk you through the solution, explain the onboarding process, and answer your questions!
