Third-party cookies refuse to disappear

At Fun Providers, a communication and digital marketing agency in Barcelona, we know the importance of online world. A very relevant fact is that in 2021, the average daily internet consumption in Spain exceeded 3.5 hours, increasing by half an hour compared to 2020. The evolution of connectivity, the expansion of online purchases to all kinds of products and services and a lifestyle more attached to the immediate has led to the digital world eating up land from the physical world.

For all these reasons, the information that users offer to companies and advertisers about their journey through the network acquires great importance. Through this subsequent digital trail, they leave clues, like Hansel and Gretel, so that the user ends up in the chocolate house, without perceiving it in an intrusive way.

The eternal battle between information to users and private data

In this context, third-party cookies work efficiently, those download files that go directly to the hard drive of the browsing device, coming from a domain other than the website that the user is visiting at that precise moment. Although they seemed to have already been sentenced and abandoned to their fate, they are reluctant to disappear, for the time being.

Data protection purists consider them the devil, while companies and advertisers see them as a blessing in order to create tailored content for users.

Third Google postponement on the disappearance of third-party cookies, now in 2024

Google, the internet search engine par excellence, used by the vast majority of users, postpones the disappearance of third-party cookies for the third time (this time until 2024). This announcement is added to the previous two ones (the first notice -in January 2020- maintained that Chrome would stop using them in early 2022. In the second, a year later, it set the expiration date in 2023).

And how does the future without cookies look like?

Without the data provided by users through third-party cookies, which show their browsing behavior (in which the route of visited subpages of a certain website is reflected), advertisers, media agencies, online and traditional media would be left blind, without the possibility of directing their ads precisely and effectively to their target. Therefore, they could not use metrics that would help to improve the entire process, impoverishing digital advertising campaigns.

But do not be alarmed. As we inexorably approach to 2024, the industry is already hard at work on a future cookieless ecosystem. Among the multiplicity of ongoing projects, there are, in development, solutions such as Google’s Privacy Sandbox (which uses an algorithm that runs in the user’s browser and analyses the internet user according to the websites has visited), IAB Spain’s TCPF (based in unauthenticated traffic, in which the anonymous user gives their consent in a local domain) or Weborama’s Goldenfish (identifies and analyses the content read by the internet user, creating qualified audience groups without cookies, IDs, or associated emails).

At Fun Providers, a communication and digital marketing agency in Barcelona, attentive to the present and the future, we make the best of today’s and tomorrow’s online marketing tools. If you feel insecure beyond an online advertising policy, we offer you our strategic consulting services to find out how to explore other new possibilities.