This month, Google has started to roll out Tracking Protection, a new feature that limits the use of cross-site tracking by deprecating third-party cookies, to an initial 1% of users.

Most major browsers do this already, so it’s not a breaking change but with Chrome set to phase out 3rd party cookies by the end of this year the impacts will increase.

There is a lot of hype out there so we thought we’d clarify a few things:

• Reporting about what users do on your website in isolation will NOT be impacted. This includes reports about user behaviour on your website from tools like GA4 and others.
• Analytics reporting that relies on user behaviour on other websites WILL be impacted. For example the GA4 demographics and interest reports. But these have been pretty subjective for a while now.
• The biggest impact will be your options for audience-building to show ads on other websites, especially your own remarketing lists since these typically rely on 3rd party cookies. However on that front, the ball is in the court of each advertising platform. It’s up to them to evolve their features to let you target your desired audience, so while there will definitely be an impact, it’s not generally on you as an advertiser to do anything but use each ad platform in a way that best aligns with your goals (which we of course can advise on even for clients where we don’t manage their ads).

There are definitely still actions you can take:

• Make your website better at capturing user contact details directly (eg. through a newsletter, gated content, chat etc)
• Consider upgrading your ad measurement stack to include server-side tracking, enhanced conversions and customer list uploads. The first step would be to allocate a budget for analytics data collection in terms of how much it’s worth to your organisation each year to collect more accurate data on your website behaviour.
• Consider alternative analytics tools to run in parallel to GA4.
• Consider migrating more ad campaigns to ones that convert on the ad platform (where possible). For example, getting people to fill out a lead form on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn directly rather than clicking through to your website to become a lead.
• As part of phasing out 3rd party cookies, Chrome has developed a protected audience API which will be the new ecosystem in Chrome for ad targeting. One of the options it has is letting a website tell Chrome a bit more about the user in a way that can be queried by ad platforms if you run ads.

If your marketing relies on targeted advertising with third-party cookies, it’s time to review and reconsider your tactics.