Few people realize how big a role cookies play in online marketing. Especially important from a marketing point of view are chrome cookies and its 3rd party cookies, for the reason that Google’s search engine – Chrome has more than 60% of the market share. So let’s find out what these cookies are and what the future holds for Google’s changes.
What are cookies?
When thinking about chrome cookies, let’s imagine a real cookie – when you have such sweets in your hands, you drop tiny crumbs behind you, by which others can trace the path you have come. We can think of the Internet cookies we are talking about in this article in exactly the same way. It is, so to speak, an identifier that allows sites to recognize us as users and track our behavior in virtual reality. Based on the information it collects about us, it can improve its system and personalize the content displayed for us.
Cookies can be divided into five types:
- Necessary – cookies that enable the use of services available on the site, such as authentication cookies used for services that require authentication on the site.
- Responsible for security – used to detect abuse of authentication within the service.
- Performance cookies – allow collecting information about our use of the service on websites.
- Functional – help remember user-selected settings and personalize the user interface, e.g. with regard to the user’s chosen language or region of origin, font size, website design, passwords, products in shopping cart etc.
- Advertising – provide advertising content tailored to the user’s interests.
We can also generally distinguish between first-party cookies and third-party cookies:
- 1st party cookies – placed in our browser directly by the site we visited, improve the user experience and overall experience of the selected website
- 3rd party cookies – files used not by the site we visited, but by its partners. By collecting information from various portals, they create our online profile, taking into account our behavior, likes and search history. The purposes of these cookies are primarily advertising, because using our profile, sites can display us more personalized content that is more likely to interest us. They can also monitor the effectiveness of such ads, measuring the number of clicks or impressions. They are primarily used in the retargeting process.
What the future holds for us on the Internet in terms of 3rd party cookies?
Google has announced that it will abandon 3rd party cookies in its browser in 2022. The decision was admittedly met with a slight delay, and we will probably have to deal with this step definitively by the end of 2023, but many industries are wondering what to do now with marketing strategies. While it’s true that other browsers such as Firefox and Safari have already dropped support for this kind of data a while ago, the fact that the Chrome browser can be considered a giant in the market brings a real revolution in the world of cookies in the near future. Certainly the withdrawal of these cookies will affect advertising strategies. For sure the market will move toward a more transparent policy towards its users. It is worth being prepared to clearly communicate how data is collected and processed, and for what purposes it will be used. The value of data collected by first-party cookies will also increase. We are therefore faced with creating a more responsible market.
