Google Chrome phasing out Third-Party cookies : what should you do?
After several false flags over the years, in December 2023, Google Chrome announced that it would finally be limiting cross-site tracking via third-party cookies.
Starting January 4, they began testing their ‘Tracking Protection’ feature on 1% of users, a move aligned with the broader Privacy Sandbox initiative aimed at phasing out third-party cookies by the second half of 2024.
The development, which sees Chrome join Safari’s ITP and Firefox’s ETP initiatives, marks the latest step in browsers addressing their users’ (and regulators’) growing privacy concerns. B2B advertisers reliant on third-party tracking and targeting, however, might be less enthusiastic.
But don’t despair, alternative tracking solutions are available.
In this post, we’re looking at what Chrome’s third-party cookie deprecation means for B2B marketers, and what you should do to ensure privacy-friendly end-to-end customer journey tracking.
Contents:
Third-party deprecation: a question of privacy
How Chrome’s deprecation affects B2Bs using third-party cookies
The era of first-party data and consent-based marketing
What should you do - the first-party and cookieless tracking checklist
What you should avoid
Chrome’s third-party cookie deprecation: a question of privacy
In recent years, the public has become increasingly aware of and sensitive to how their personal data is collected, used, and shared online.
Third-party cookies have come under scrutiny for compromising user privacy without explicit consent. In particular, ‘advertising cookies’ from AdTech like DoubleClick or Critero, which track users across different sites to gather detailed profiles of their online behavior.
Regulatory Pressures
Governments and regulatory bodies worldwide have responded to these privacy concerns by implementing evermore stringent data protection laws. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in the United States are prime examples.
These regulations require greater transparency and user consent before collecting and processing personal data, making the use of third-party cookies increasingly challenging for browsers.
Google Chrome’s decision to join Safari and Firefox in phasing out cross-site third-party cookies is rooted firmly in these privacy concerns - as the first line of their update very clearly shows: “When it comes to improving privacy on the web, the work is never finished.”
So by the end of 2024, Chrome will prevent third-party servers or vendors from tracking users across sites.
How Chrome’s deprecation affects B2Bs using third-party cookies
Ok, so what’s so bad about this?
If we ignore the privacy element and take the view of publishers, third-party cookies, again think DoubleClick, Critero, Quantcast, aren’t all that bad. In fact, they’ve been instrumental in cross-site tracking, ad (re)targeting and personalization, and have enabled a better understanding of their audiences’ behavior.
Attribution
In some cases, third-party cookies have also been a key component of attributing impressions and clicks with conversions. In these cases, Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) handle attribution within their platforms by associating a third-party cookie in a conversion event on a brand-owned site to a third-party cookie associated with an impression.
So when Chrome comes along, as the browser with the largest market share, accounting for approximately 65.3% of users, and pulls the plug on these cookies, it can feel like a big blow to your ability to track and target your audience.
It requires that any B2B company relying on third-party cookies completely reevaluates its tracking and targeting strategy.
But that’s not actually a bad thing.
The era of first-party data and consent-based marketing
What you need is to transition towards a first-party and consent-based data strategy, which will not only allow you to maintain campaign effectiveness and relevance but also give you much greater data control.
Google themselves were already suggesting as much back in 2021, and regulators have pushed in this direction too - e.g. EU’s Court of Justice ruling against Meta.
First-party data tracking
First-party data tracking involves owning your customer data. That is, collecting and analyzing data directly from interactions with users on your own digital properties, such as the website, app, marketing automation platform, and also from your CRM.
There are three elements to this:
First-party cookies
The first thing that needs to be tracked is site behavior. For this you need consent-based first-party cookies - yes not all cookies are bad!
First-party cookies are set by the publisher’s web server or any JavaScript that is loaded on the website. These cookies play a vital role in enhancing user experience and are specifically designed to be available only to the domain that created them, providing a high level of security and privacy.
Which is why they are supported by all browsers and encouraged by regulators.
Once the user consents - whether through the banner you’ve introduced or later through a form submission (more on this in the checklist below) - the script will load in the browser and will track and identify user behavior.
The best thing about consent-based tracking is that it targets users who have landed on your site, i.e. they have some level of awareness either of your brand or of the content you produce. So they already care at some level about your brand and products. Which means, unlike third-party cookie data, you’re much less likely to waste your ad spend on uninterested audiences.
Analytics tracking
It’s also possible to collect some analytics data from tracking mechanisms such as “Visitor Hash” made up of non-personal information only and Session cookies, which are part of the ‘strictly necessary cookies’ category.
CRM data
First-party cookies are only part of the tracking equation. For the B2B marketer, incorporating down-funnel data is equally as important - especially when it comes to measurement and attribution.
And for this, you need to pull CRM data.
CRM data adds the necessary down-funnel conversion data that’s crucial to measuring your marketing performance (no more need for third-party cookie attribution) and setting up highly personalized (re)targeting campaigns.
Once you have all your tracking data and CRM data joined and cleaned in your data warehouse, you will have the most comprehensive view of the B2B customer journey possible. You will have also built first-party audience data that will allow you to accurately target and retarget.
And you’ll own it completely.
Aaaannd, most importantly, it will be fully privacy-compliant.
Little wonder that the browsers and regulators are pointing in this direction.
What should you do? The first-party data tracking checklist
1. Establish consent-based first-party cookie tracking
The first step you need to take is to implement consent-based first-party cookie tracking and identification across your site.
Tracking script
To begin with you need to install a tracking script to capture and identify site user behavior.
Make sure that this script puts IDs in cookies and local storage - most analytics scripts, like Dreamdata and Segment, do this out-of-the-box - as local storage offers a better way to persist user information than cookies.
All this, of course, needs to be consent-based. So you need to introduce consent prompts to give users the option to accept or reject the tracking.
This can be done through a clear and informative consent banner (using a reliable consent management platform is the best course of action here) and by including cookie opt-ins in form submissions.
1st Party Intent Data
In B2B, identifying the company can be just as valuable as the user. Integrating IP lookup as part of your tracking will ensure you pick up this first-party intent data - company, engagement and timestamp - before a user identifies themselves through form submissions. You can read more about how Dreamdata does this here →
Forms: the key to identification
Form submissions play a fundamental role in the identification process. You want to positively identify your users - get their mail, company, role, etc. - as early and often as possible (without excessively impacting UX).
Practical examples of this could be to consider: gating more content behind email submission; prompt users to log in to your product where it’s possible, basically going for micro-conversions earlier and often.
2. UTM everything
UTMs are the surest way to keep track of your referrer traffic.
UTMs are snippets of text added to the end of a URL that tracks important data about each click, allowing marketers to understand where their traffic is coming from and how it engages with their content.
When it comes to generating good UTM parameters, you need to ensure that you’re:
Consistent - Use a consistent naming convention for all your parameters. Inconsistencies can lead to fragmented data and confusion when analyzing results. E.g. decide on a standard for lowercase or uppercase letters, spaces (use underscores or hyphens instead), and stick to it.
Descriptive (but concise) - Each UTM parameter should clearly describe its purpose without being overly long. For example, use “spring_newsletter” instead of just “newsletter” for the campaign name to specify the campaign while keeping the URL manageable.
To avoid errors and ensure consistency, you can always use a free UTM builder like Google’s.
Methodical - Apply UTM parameters to all marketing and advertising campaigns, not just selected ones.
You then need to ensure that you are correctly mapping these UTMs for your analytics. Off-the-shelf tools like Dreamdata map UTMs automatically. You can check out this comprehensive guide on UTM mapping to see how it’s done.
3. Connect your tracking data to revenue data (use a B2B customer data platform)
For the B2B marketer, site behavioral data isn’t enough on its own.
You need to collect data from across your go-to-market tech stack, in particular your CRM to track down-funnel conversions.
This data then needs to be connected, processed and modeled with the rest of the first-party data. This will ensure there’s no duplication and that every touched mapped accurately to produce a complete picture of the customer journey.
As we’re in B2B, this needs to be account-based modeling so you can see the company journey and not just individual users. After all, the person who starts the journey isn’t always the decision-marker, nor the person holding the purse strings.
A tool like Dreamdata uses proprietary technology to track, collect, clean and model your customer data out of the box. And offers a complete data analytics and activation element (including offline conversions connections - see package on top of this.
4. Send offline conversions and audience data back to ad platforms
All the main ad platforms now offer offline conversions integrations which enable you to send conversion data directly back to the platforms.
With a comprehensive first-party data setup (from the previous steps above) you can feed your ad campaign manager with very high-quality conversion data.
This solution makes any lingering benefit of third-party cookies redundant. You can now easily and more confidently send conversion data back to these point solutions.
Additionally, by sharing conversions and employing strategies focused on specific funnel stages, advertisers can improve efficiency and achieve better outcomes at each stage.
Some solutions, like Dreamdata, also offer offline conversion connections out-of-the-box. Dreamdata currently sends online and offline conversions data - split according to your pipeline conversions - to Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
Targeting with first-party audience data
Equally important in overcoming the third-party cookie gap, is activating your first-party audience data for targeting and retargeting.
In the same way as offline conversions enables you to send your conversion data to the ad platforms, you can build and send first-party audience data to your point solutions.
Here too, the main ad platforms offer the option to feed first-party audience data. For instance, LinkedIn’s Matched Audience can be used for your account target list, say for ABM plays, and Google’s Lookalike segments trains the campaign manager to build lookalike audiences.
What You Should Not Do
While first-party data is the most obvious solution for tracking available, there are also other options such as fingerprinting.
When exploring these you need to watch out for ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ situations.
Fingerprinting
An oft-suggested alternative is fingerprinting, which tracks and identifies a user based on the user’s computer hardware, software, add-ons, and even preferences.
However fingerprinting contains enough information to uniquely identify a personal device and so puts you back in square one vis-a-vis privacy - perhaps even square -1 as fingerprinting can even circumvent private browsing.
It’s little surprise therefore, that fingerprinting has already been blocked by Firefox and cracked down on by Safari as the digital ‘fingerprint’ infringes the same privacy as third-party cookies.
Besides fingerprinting, AdTech companies are now working hard to launch alternative tracking models. James Hercher makes a great analysis of some of these alternatives here. Amongst these contextual ads are perhaps the most obvious.
Contextual ads are served on content relevant to your target customer. So say you’re a martech, then the contextual ads data provider will have data related to the content your users are likely to consume based on keyword targeting or by scraping the net.
The issue here, is that it’s one step removed from actual tracked data, on top of which, as James Hercher highlights, there’s not yet been any consolidation of data and services here - each provider is offering their own solution.
The bottom line is that the last thing you want to do is jump the gun and embrace a sub-standard solution. So make sure to exercise caution.
Conclusion
The shift away from third-party cookies represents both a challenge and an opportunity for digital marketers.
By focusing on first-party data, embracing consent-based marketing, and leveraging tools like Dreamdata, businesses can navigate this transition effectively. Adapting to these changes is essential for maintaining competitive edge and ensuring compliance with the evolving privacy standards.
Start tracking end-to-end B2B customer journey data today with Dreamdata.
