Google To Retain Use Of 3rd Party Cookies

Hello Cookies! Google decides it’s not getting rid of them after all.

In a move that will probably not come as much of a surprise to marketers, Google has announced today that it will not be moving ahead with its planned depreciation of third-party cookies. 

This is the plan that was announced in 2020, then pushed back in 2022, again in 2024 and now cancelled completely.

Google now says that it plans to retain the use of third-party cookies indefinitely, but will introduce a new one-time prompt for Google logged-in users like those with Gmail, or using the Chrome browser (accounting for more than 60% of all web users).

This prompt will allow users to set their cookie preferences at a Google-level, which will then apply across the sites they visit. It is not immediately clear how this will interact with individual website-level consent – whether it would block all third-party cookies if agreed within the prompt, even if users then consent to all cookies on a particular website, or if it will adapt to new consent preferences according to users’ browsing behaviour.

While this is a setback in terms of privacy for users, it is somewhat good news for performance marketing, as Google has to date remained unclear about how it was going to continue to empower marketing attribution in a world without third-party cookies.

Yesterday’s announcement suggests that Google has finally given up on the pretence it had a plan for this, and is instead going to use this new system to try to mitigate concerns from privacy regulators while still using the technology that was at issue in the first place.

So what does this mean for you?

Not much will, or should, change for marketers immediately following this announcement.

Google products will continue to use third-party cookies as they have until now, but users across the world will continue to be able to manually decline these cookies at an individual level.

It is also worth noting that the other big browsers (Safari and Firefox) continue to provide enhanced privacy features that block third-party cookies automatically, so marketers should continue to divest from their reliance on these, and instead focus on capturing first-party information and event-based analytics

If you want to know more about how this announcement may impact your marketing activity, or if you want to ensure your site is set up to adapt to changes like this, get in touch with us today.