High-performing B2B lead gen landing pages: design and information architecture
John Woods
October 3, 2024
High-performing B2B lead gen landing pages: design and information architecture
A reprieve (of sorts) for third-party cookies
Google’s position on third-party cookies in Chrome has shifted again, and this change is a big one. It now seems that Chrome support for third-party cookies will remain into the indefinite future, albeit subject to enhanced user controls. Rather than going extinct completely, third-party cookies will survive in captivity.
The news broke in this announcement from Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative on 22nd July.
What's changed?
Prior to this announcement, Google was suggesting that support for third-party cookies would be completely removed from Chrome at some future point. But there was no precise deadline. (A previous deadline of the end of 2024 had already been relaxed.) I wrote about this back in April.
But the new announcement changes this. Support for third-party cookies will remain into the indefinite future. They will, however, be subject to what Google calls “elevated user choice”. There are no details on that at present, but I’m interpreting it to mean it will be easier for a user to opt out of third-party cookies.
While this announcement only relates directly to Chrome, it seems likely that Microsoft Edge (which shares Chrome’s underlying Chromium technology) will follow suit.
This announcement is particularly good news for a number of ad networks that rely heavily on third-party cookies to deliver on their value proposition. (And indeed competition concerns about the adverse impact of the proposal cookie phase-out on these ad networks is arguably one of the reasons why Google has changed tack.)
What difference does this make to B2B marketers?
If you’re making heavy use of marketing techniques that rely on third-party cookies – for instance, most types of remarketing – then this gives you some breathing space. Those techniques will continue to work into the indefinite future. That’s good news for B2B digital marketers because those techniques are a powerful and cost-effective part of most B2B digital marketing strategies, and because the alternatives that were emerging within the Privacy Sandbox seemed unlikely to perform very well for B2B marketing use cases.
However the direction of travel here is still clear – third-party cookies are under threat and are likely to be increasingly marginalised, whether by technological fiat or by user choice. I still recommend that B2B marketers treat third-party cookies as an endangered species, and look to shift their marketing mix towards techniques that don’t need third-party cookies. The advice in my previous blog still stands, we can just afford to move a little more slowly.
Further reading
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