Google Search Console (“GSC”) is Google’s way of communicating information about Google’s view of a website back to that website’s owner.

Some key facts about GSC:

• It’s free and open access. Anyone with a website can use it.
• It’s an essential tool if you are remotely serious about SEO and content marketing.
• You can use GSC to ask Google to remove certain content from search results.
• GSC provides some important hygiene functions that might mitigate or avoid several harmful scenarios where something has gone technically wrong with your website.
• It provides an important safety net when you are making major changes to your website or domain, like a restructure or switching to a new CMS.
• You can only use GSC on a website that you own, and you have to authenticate your domain with Google before you can use it. Until you do this, you’ll miss out on the benefits of GSC.

GSC isn’t the most glamorous tool in a technical marketer’s armoury, but it’s foundational for SEO. And if you have a PR or legal crisis around some website content, or if something goes badly wrong with Google’s view of your website (for example, if your site is hacked), GSC can be an absolute lifesaver. So even if you don’t care much about SEO, it’s worth making sure you have GSC in place and that your team has some familiarity with it, just in case of a future technical or content-related emergency.

Third-party cookies have been endangered for some time. But now it’s official – the third-party cookie will go extinct in 2024. It will finally take its place in the museum of obsolete internet technologies, alongside the dial-up modem, Netscape Navigator and MySpace.

Why does this matter for B2B digital marketers?

In a nutshell: because most types of remarketing, and some other intent-based targeting techniques, just stop working without third-party cookies. So some B2B digital campaigns that have performed well in the past will have to be reworked or abandoned.

The ad platform operators are being a little coy – for perhaps understandable reasons – about exactly what the impacts will be and exactly what replacements and alternatives will be offered. So we B2B advertisers face some uncertainty in the coming months. Let me guide you as best I can through what’s happening, when it will happen, and what you should plan to do about it.

Disclaimers: as always, we offer this information in good faith but nothing in this article should be construed as legal advice. And there are a lot of uncertainties here and things might change (for instance if regulators intervene). I’ll do my best to be definitive, but you should read everything that follows with an implicit “My best guess at the moment is…”.

As technology evolves, so do the tactics employed by cybercriminals. In an effort to protect their customers from spam and email attacks that spoof sender domains, both Google and Yahoo have announced stricter sender authentication requirements, which will come into effect later this week. These changes will have a significant impact on B2B email marketing practices, so it’s important for marketers to understand and adapt to these new policies.

Our recent analysis of the Built Environment reveals that nearly all organisations could significantly improve business outcomes simply by following digital marketing best practice.

A few of our headline findings:

• 91% of organisations are missing two or more digital marketing best practices
• Only 28% were meeting search experience best practice
• Only 22% were compliant with cookie legislation
• Only 21% were using online chat
• Only 9% met Google’s core web vitals standards

Cookie regulation is on the move

The regulatory environment for cookie consent reminds me of A23a, the world’s largest iceberg (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67507558) – dangerous, poorly-understood and takes a while to move, but when it finally starts to change it’s important to pay attention.

Like A23a, the regulators – at least, the UK’s Information Commissioner – have been making moves in November 2023. Major sites have been given 30 days to adjust the way they gather users’ consent for cookies – see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-67488305 for more details.

Although to date there has been relatively little enforcement action, everyone in the digital marketing world needs to be mindful that the regulatory environment around cookies is both strict and complex. And the laws have teeth – companies can be fined up to 4% of global turnover, and we’ve seen fines of more than £100 million already imposed on large tech companies.

So we think it’s timely to remind B2B marketers to take a look at their consent management setup.

Last orders at the “cookie bar”

A “cookie bar” or other drop-in user interface component is the most visible part of consent management, but on its own is just not enough to ensure compliance with the regulatory environment.

If you want to comply with the law, and to verify that you continue to comply as things change over time, then you are going to need a proper Consent Management Platform (or CMP). This is a technology that you integrate with your website (and any other web-based digital content, like specialist landing pages) and which makes the technical aspects of compliance much easier to achieve and assure.

What does a CMP do?

A good CMP does 4 main things:

1. Generates the “cookie bar” user interface component that allows a user to grant or withhold consent for cookies of different types, and records that consent – ironically, most likely in a cookie! – so that a user doesn’t have to be asked again on a return visit.
2. Provides technical control mechanisms allowing for tracking scripts and other cookie-using components to modify their behaviour based on a user’s consent choices – for example, not firing an analytics tag if a user hasn’t consented. These control mechanisms need to be able to play nicely with the rest of your tech stack. In particular, they need to work with a tag manager if you use one.
3. Automatically documents the cookies that your site uses, with the purposes of each, to avoid a lot of error-prone manual work in maintaining a compliant cookie policy document.
4. Automatically audits the use of cookies on your site so that you can tell whether you are compliant, and identify any steps you need to take to remedy non-compliance.
   Here’s an example of the technical architecture of a website with a CMP in place:

And here’s how that picture changes if a tag management system (like Google Tag Manager) is in use:

There’s a LOT of complexity here! And only a tiny part of that is the visible “cookie bar”.

With all this complexity, there is a lot that can go wrong. Even the best CMP does not guarantee compliance. So it is crucial to use the auditing features of your CMP to check for compliance. And even once you have a compliant site, you should still plan to repeat this audit process regularly – it’s easy for non-compliant technologies to creep in via apparently harmless site updates.