Google first moved the deadline in June 2021, stating that it had ‘become clear that more time was needed across the ecosystem to get this right’ and they would thereby be slowing down the rollout until mid-2023. Following on from this, Google have now stated that, due to feedback, they ‘need more time to evaluate and test the new Privacy Sandbox technologies before deprecating third-party cookies’.

While this may sound like good news, the changes still loom large over the industry. Marketers should not rest on their laurels, but should think ahead and evolve their digital strategy and execution into a durable, privacy-centric practice.

What does this mean?

Despite the delay undoubtedly giving the industry more time to prepare, the deprecation of third-party cookies is still very much on the horizon and it’s more important now than ever before to prepare your infrastructure for a privacy-first world.

Regardless of the additional time, businesses should prioritize building out their first party data infrastructure – taking responsibility for their users’ data and creating a strong data-driven strategy that can handle the change when third party cookies are gone.

This moment of respite should not be seen as an opportunity to sit back and wait. The efficacy and reach of third party cookies will continue to reduce, and as consumer privacy interests take center stage, implementing durable solutions remains the correct way forward. 

With this in mind, we’ve curated a list of considerations and assets to help you survive in a privacy first world.

Considerations:

• Take control and consider running a complete campaign audit and privacy health-check of your business to identify exactly where you’ll be losing visibility
• Invest the time, and budget needed into your strategy
• Establish where your blind spots are and manipulate your strategy to build out data in these blind spots
• Build out your website and app ecosystem to be capable of tracking a similar level of data to what you are getting from third party cookies
• Determine a solid content strategy; building an interest based audience based on the content that users engage with
• Focus on contextual data over demographic data
• Align your use of Google-curated audiences in upper funnel-activities properly
• Champion value and meaning; creating a customer-centric approach that will engage consumers and ultimately help you build out your first-party datasets
• Complete the switch to Google Analytics 4, and invest the time necessary to understand the platform, and its capabilities
• Establish who your organisational privacy champions are, and allocate responsibilities accordingly
• Work with your branding/content/product teams to work out what your value exchange is for clients and how that affects your content (i.e. putting actual effort into working out how your site functionality/content gives value to users that would warrant them wanting to log in/identify themselves/opt into marketing audiences/etc).

Useful Assets:

Cut through the privacy noise and get actionable insights to help tackle the world of privacy head-on in our 2021 event ‘Cutting Through The Noise’ where Incubeta’s UK Managing Director James Sleaford was joined by US Managing Director AdTech & Measurement Solutions Zoe Hall  and Director of Strategy Damien Bennett alongside our guest speaker Zach Faruque, Offerings Analyst at One Trust.

For more guidance, have a read of some of our privacy-based content:

• Why You Need to Join the Privacy Conversation
• How to Survive in a Privacy First World
• Digital & Corporate Responsibility in a Privacy-Centric World
• The Future-is-Now; Why Reprieving Privacy Optimization is a Ticking Time Bomb
• The Privacy Dilemma and The World Without Cookies
• Everything You Need to Know About Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

For more guidance on what this announcement means, and how you can prepare your strategy for the eventual deprecation of third party cookies, get in touch today, or sign up to Incubeta’s upcoming event, the Future of Tomorrow’s World.

Register Here