Find out why, despite Google’s latest announcement, the cookie’s days are numbered. And how our bespoke solution can deliver you results whatever happens with the cookie.
On Thursday 24 June 2021, Google announced that it was delaying its plans to scrap third-party cookies from its Chrome browser until late 2023. This is two years later than its initial time frame.
Google’s announcement was made amid considerable regulatory scrutiny and concerns from privacy advocates and the advertising industry over its approach to replacing the tool. (Its FloC trials have already been abandoned in markets where they don’t meet local consumer privacy standards.)
Vinay Goel, privacy engineering director at Chrome said: “While there’s considerable progress with this initiative, it’s become clear that more time is needed across the ecosystem to get this right.” But while the third-party cookie may have had a stay of execution for now, its future is still uncertain. And that means that the industry can’t afford to relax quite yet.
It’s dangerous to rely on the cookie
Indeed, we’ve long believed that it’s dangerous to rely so heavily on the cookie for targeting, which is why, back in 2017, pre-GDPR, we developed our own fully consented, cookie-less solution.
That solution was a new piece of technology, consenTag which directly sits on the advertiser website to pass consent, collect consented information and data to deliver more relevant advertising. It also allows for greater attribution due to the limitation of cookies.
It turns out we were ahead of the curve. Today, in order to be compliant with TCF 2.0 the CMP must sit directly on the advertiser website.
How consenTag allows you to accurately target without cookies
There are three key targeting and attribution methods:
- Deterministic: Using an ID for a 1:1 match in targeting &attribution to a browser. Common IDs are cookieIDs, Hashed email IDs, Login IDs
- Probabilistic: Leveraging many non-personal signals to get a degree of confidence in correct targeting & attribution to a browser
- Digital signal aggregations: Leveraging many variant signals tracking moves away from indexes to make correct targeting and attribution decisions
Our non-cookie-based user targeting and attribution technology ActiveID solution can mix probabilistic and
deterministic with consent. We do this by:
- Managing consent preferences: Our consenTag is our consent management platform that complies fully with privacy legislation across every device in the world.
- Using relevant targeting for better performance: Target browsers and devices that block third party cookies and serve accurate creatives by not just relying on a single identifier.
- Joining the dots with attribution: We use a hybrid and agnostic data models to determine accurate marketing attribution against all browsers, devices and channels.
We are already operating cookie-less in Apple and Firefox Browsers right now.
Our products are powered by privacy-preserving APIs
Unlike other inadequate non-cookie solutions, we don’t need to build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products.
We realise this means other providers may offer a level of user identity for ad tracking across the web that we will not — like PII graphs based on people’s email addresses. We don’t believe these solutions will meet rising consumer expectations for privacy, nor will they stand up to rapidly evolving regulatory restrictions.
This means they are not a sustainable long term investment. Instead, our web products will be powered by privacy-preserving APIs which prevent individual tracking while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers.
We can deliver powerful results in a cookie-less world
Our model is bespoke and agnostic, and we can evolve it with you over time to support new legislation, support changes made by Google and Apple and support your needs.
Our solution is fully compliant with all government privacy legislation, including GDPR and ePR, and produces highly accurate and measurable results. We’re also on the IAB list of registered TCF Vendors, and have partnered with the leading third party and neutral CMP, OneTrust.
So in a world where everything seems in flux, we can offer the certainty of a compliant solution that will work whatever Google ultimately decides to do with third-party cookies, and however legislation may change over time.
If you’d like to learn more about how ActiveID and consenTag can help you achieve impressive results without relying on cookies, get in touch.