Transcript
“Hi, my name is Oliver Brewood, Executive Director at BDB, and in this video, I’m going to talk about Google’s plans to U-turn on the cookieless future and what that means for B2B marketers.
Around four years ago, Google originally announced their plans to deprecate support for third-party cookies in their Chrome browser. What this essentially meant was that things that relied on third-party cookies, particularly things like advertising options, tracking, and retargeting, would no longer function in Chrome. That’s a big deal because Chrome accounts for around 64% of the world’s browser usage, and other browsers like Firefox, Safari, and others have already deprecated support for third-party cookies. With Google Chrome going, that would mean that effectively the last big browser that still supported third-party cookies, and therefore all those advertising options associated with it, would no longer be available.
Google has created what they call the Privacy Sandbox with tools in it, like the Topics API. The whole focus here is to make sure that there are suitable privacy-focused ways to still allow advertisers to continue to target their audiences. Unfortunately for us B2B users, things like the Topics API just weren’t that applicable. Basically, it would add you to a kind of an anonymous list of people that were interested in a topic when you went browsing the internet. So, if you browsed a holiday site, you might get added to a list of people that were interested in holidays, which is great for B2C, but unfortunately, there just weren’t any categories within the Topics API that were particularly appropriate to B2B audiences.
Naturally, a lot of advertisers are very concerned about this large change to the advertising landscape, and there are also regulatory challenges towards the whole Privacy Sandbox as well.
So, what Google has now said is that they no longer plan to deprecate third-party cookies. As I’ve mentioned, this was originally planned four years ago and had constantly been delayed to the point where I think it had now been extended to be coming at the end of 2024, but it has now been canceled entirely, which means that Chrome will continue to support third-party cookies for the foreseeable future. What they’ve said they’ll do instead is introduce more controls for users using the Google Chrome browser to allow them to select the type of cookies that they’re interested in receiving. Alongside the changes to Chrome, they’re also going to be working on additional developments to the Privacy Sandbox and will continue to work with regulators to iron out the issues there.
So, what should we do as B2B marketers? Well, for the time being, we can continue to retarget as we have been doing using platforms like YouTube and Google Ads. But know, as options are added to Google Chrome that will allow people to opt out of cookies, you may see a reduced number of people that are actually available within those audiences. So, keep that up for the time being, but start planning on alternatives in terms of how you can actually reach and engage with your audiences.
This includes options like using platforms that don’t rely on third-party cookies for retargeting. So, take platforms like Meta for Facebook and LinkedIn, who had already switched to using first-party data in order to enable that retargeting, but you can also use your own first-party data by creating things like email lists and capturing data that way to make sure that you continue to engage with your audiences.
And I suppose other than that, just keep an eye on what Google is doing with the Privacy Sandbox. Maybe they will add some options that make it particularly suitable for us in the future. I hope you found this quick update helpful. For more B2B marketing updates, please feel free to follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube.”
