Marketing that Won’t Go Stale with the Decline of Third-Party Cookies

Let’s begin with some cookie basics:

If you’ve consumed any digital marketing news recently, you may have been taking in a steady diet of doomsday pieces about the end of the third-party cookie. If, however, you don’t totally nerd out over marketing news like we do over here at Binary Fabric, then perhaps the most you know about third-party cookies is that they’re mentioned in banners that pop up on websites of all kinds now (including ours). So what’s the deal? Are there more cookie banners in our future? Or are these sweetly-named bits of web data getting old?

Let’s begin with some cookie basics: what are they? how are they used? and why must we constantly accept them from websites? While cookies have been getting a bad rap lately, they play a huge part in making the modern internet convenient and easily navigable. In order to understand their benefits, it is important to distinguish between first-party and third-party cookies.

You can think of first-party cookies as information voluntarily exchanged between you and the website you’re visiting. They can recognize you as a frequent visitor and prompt you to log in, they remember the items you put in a shopping cart, and they recommend other parts of the website you might want to visit based on what you’ve looked at before. All of the information exists and is exchanged between you and the website you are visiting.

Third-party cookies, on the other hand, are created by entities other than the website you are visiting and are mostly concerned with advertising. Some third-party cookies track your browsing in order to serve you personalized advertisements for things you might actually be interested in buying. The reason you might get an ad for a sofa on a sports blog is because a cookie noticed you browsing sofas on Ikea recently.

How the Web Cookie Crumbles

Though many people enjoy personalized advertisements over generic ones, in recent years, third-party cookies have come under the scrutiny of digital privacy advocates. Popular browsers like Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox have made updates that limit the efficacy of third-party cookies, and Google Chrome will soon follow suit. Google has announced that by 2024, they will phase out third-party cookie use in Chrome. Hence the ominous headlines filling our marketing news feeds recently.

Marketing Alternatives to Third-Party Cookies

But is this really the end of online advertising as we know it? Hardly. At Binary Fabric, we understand the ever-changing internet, and we pride ourselves on being at the cutting edge of marketing changes. That’s why we’re already thinking of alternatives to the third-party cookie. Here’s just a couple forward-thinking advertising strategies we’ve been nerding out on:

Contextual Advertising

Contextual advertising is all about placing the right ads in the right place at the right time. Savvy marketers understand their clients’ competition and the digital spaces potential customers might visit. With this knowledge, they tailor their ad buys to the most impactful sectors. 

First-party Cookies

As we’ve mentioned, first-party cookies store only consensual data exchanged between the website visited and the visiting user. We all know data is crucial when it comes to best serving our customers, and customers will often voluntarily provide data to trusted websites to improve their user experience. We are innovating first-party cookie use with user surveys, contact forms, and other consensually-provided information that can help our clients’ websites earn their customer’s trust and stand out from their competitors.

SEO Power

Any web design and digital marketing company worth their salt understands the power of Search Engine Optimization (or SEO). At Binary Fabric, we’ve been honing our organic SEO skills for years. We know how to polish a website’s design, create a seamless user experience, write superb SEO content, refine load speeds, and connect with other digital spaces in order to maximize search engine rankings. Our team’s existing talents will only become more important as third-party cookies become less so.

Times change. So does the internet. We don’t get frustrated by this fact of life; we use it as fuel to propel ourselves into the future. If you’re in need of web design or digital advertising services that will never go stale, let us know. We’d love to hear from you.