Webinar Recap: Effective Marketing Without Third-Party Cookies

Third-party cookies are on the verge of extinction — Google plans to phase them out by 2024. In this partner webinar, Manuel Tonez (Director of Client Strategy at Bloomreach) and Robert Schumacher (Director at gateB) spoke about the impacts. They answered the most important questions and showed how companies can position themselves to be successful in a world without third-party cookies.

Missed the webinar? You can find the most important insights here.

Data backs this up. A recent study analyzed which browsers customers use to access the company website and which browsers support third-party cookies. Third-party cookies were already limited in 61% of the sessions.

In these sessions, it is not possible to re-identify customers via third-party cookies because the browsers no longer support this. Instead, all these visitors are treated as anonymous — as if they were seeing the website for the first time.

The resulting unclear picture increases the risk of making the wrong marketing decisions. Companies that have relied on third-party data for customer personalization need to take action now.

Let's go through a quick overview of the individual data sources:

• Zero-party data is provided by customers themselves (for example, in surveys).

• First-party data is data collected in direct interaction with customers.

• Second-party data comes from outside sources (for example, partner companies with whom customers interact).

• Third-party data is aggregated across user behavior on the internet. This type of data is behind those "creepy moments" — when users are served suitable advertising after an offline encounter. This data will soon no longer exist.

There are three central reasons for discontinuing cookies. Firstly, data leaks — such as the scandal surrounding Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in 2016 — have increasingly highlighted the problem of third-party cookies in recent years. Beyond that, regulations including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, 2018) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA, 2020) are tightening up the handling of data. Finally, more and more privacy functions from different market participants are making overarching tracking more difficult.

In this partner webinar, Manuel Tonez (Director of Client Strategy at Bloomreach) and Robert Schumacher (Director at gateB) talked about the impact of the cookie rollback. Missed the webinar?

In the near future, companies will need alternatives for third-party-cookie-based communication. We see two approaches to this: the third-party ID solution and the combination of first-party data and IDs in a Customer Data Platform (CDP).

The CDP approach empowers your company to take ownership of the data and process your data yourself.