Rob Dennis | 29 July 2024

Earlier this week it was announced that Google, after years of delays and commitment to deprecating third-party cookies, won’t be going through with the original plan and has subsequently changed its approach.

According to Google, this new approach gives users more control over what is tracked during their activity on Chrome. Google is also currently in discussions with regulators about this change. Early rumours indicate that they’re adopting a similar approach to what has taken place on Apple devices since the deployment of iOS 14, with a prompt to users asking whether they’re happy to be tracked.

What this means

Google’s change of approach was likely driven by its desire to balance the needs of its users, shareholders, advertisers and partners such as Apple. Currently, businesses will be in limbo while Google is in conversation with regulators over getting this approach approved. However, due to the lack of a given timeline, the pace at which businesses need to transition to a cookieless strategy is less intense than it was.

What should advertisers do?

The key thing for advertisers and businesses is to continue moving away from using third-party cookies and implement more robust data strategies such as Consent Mode v2, Enhanced Conversions and leveraging first-party data to grow. This is due to the high likelihood that third-party cookies’ demise is merely delayed rather than prevented and whilst they still exist, they’re importance will continue to diminish.

We’ll now take you through the options available to businesses to take the next step towards a more robust data strategy.

Consent Mode v2

Recent legislation changed how user consent was given when they landed on a website or app. For users to be tracked legally, they had to provide positive consent rather than the previous use of “presumed consent”. In many instances, this meant that there was significant data loss in Google Analytics and performance fluctuations in Google Ads when this new cookie consent was applied.

However, by fully deploying advanced Consent Mode, Google Tags can send cookieless pings that enable it to bridge any data gap by using non-personally identifiable information to model out what these non-consented users are doing on your site.

Recommendation

Implement the advanced version consent mode v2 to minimise data loss and to gain a better understanding of how people are engaging with your website or app.

Enhanced conversions

This is a more robust form of conversion tracking in both GA4 and Google Ads, which uses first-party conversion data, such as an email, to track conversions; rather than solely relying on cookies. This form of tracking is done in a privacy-safe way and can reduce the number of duplicate conversions being tracked both online and offline.

If you’re using the Google Ads tags to record important events, then implementing enhanced conversions will improve their attribution via Google Ads data-driven attribution model going forward.

If you use GA4 key events instead, using enhanced conversions will improve the accuracy of Google Ads’ involvement in these events via GA4’s cross-channel, data-driven attribution model.

Recommendation

Establish your reporting source of truth and implement the relevant version of enhanced conversions.

A man in a blue shirt is seen talking during a meeting, seated at a wooden table, with another person partially obstructing the foreground.

A silver MacBook with a blank search engine page open on the screen sits on a wooden desk. The desk also holds a black smartphone, a few blue pens, and a decorative miniature cannon in the background. The scene is well-lit by natural light.

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Using first-partydata

Understanding your customers is an increasingly important part of modern digital marketing and Google has made significant progress in providing advertisers opportunities to grow their business. One recent feature has been the introduction of customer list segments. Advertisers can now label their customer lists as:

All customers
Purchasers
High-value customers
Disengaged customers
Qualified leads
Converted leads
Paid subscribers
Loyalty sign-ups
Basket abandoners

Recommendation

Segment your CRM data based on business-critical factors such as LTV or whether they’ve lapsed and look to layer this into your paid media activity going forward.