Blog about Digital Advertising & Marketing Technology

We now know that third-party cookies will be staying with us a little longer. On June 24, Google released an updated timeline for the Privacy Sandbox – a high-level plan indicating that it will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three month period starting mid-2023.

The question is – how much more time does the industry actually have? The answer is – not much. Based on the official procedures for bringing new features to Chrome, we at RTB House expect that the next two years will be filled with work.

When you run a business, reaching the right customers with your offers is one of the fundamental requirements for success. All of the uncertainty around whether this will still be possible when Google switches off 3rd-party cookies is obviously a worry — especially as things are moving fast and it is difficult to keep up with the news. We can’t all be experts.

Luckily, we have experts on hand so you don’t have to be one. Laurie da Silva and Richard Johnson are hosting a new series of snackable videos on The Cookieless Future. They give a point-by-point breakdown for newcomers and more detailed explanations for those familiar with the subject. Watch the first video now, which talks about whether the end of cookies means the end of advertising. And, if not, what is set to replace them? Get to know more about advertising without cookies.

Google Chrome set an ambitious goal in their January 2020 announcement to have the key privacy-preserving advertising technologies deployed by late 2022 for the developer community to start adopting them. On June 24, Google released an updated timeline for the Privacy Sandbox and revealed a plan to phase out support for third-party cookies over a three month period starting mid-2023.

We observe a confusion on the market regarding how changes to cookies will affect the user experience in retargeting. In this article, we will focus on the user’s perspective, starting the journey from the advertiser’s website through what is happening in the user’s browser, ending on the publisher’s website.

Imagine a world without personalized ads. Brands would be forced to build generic messaging and throw it into the void, praying that it connected with someone. Customers would be less likely to find the products they actually want and forced to settle for whatever they happened upon online. Personalized ads help companies connect with people who actually want their products and save consumers from wasting their time on irrelevant content.

However, there’s a new challenge on the horizon. Consumers have become increasingly privacy conscious, and as an industry, we have had to find new ways to personalize our content to consumers while also respecting their privacy. This guide will walk you through personalized ads and how they will function as we move towards more privacy-friendly personalized ads.

In January 2020, Google announced that it will end support for third-party tracking cookies in the Google Chrome browser “within two years,” signifying major changes for retargeting Google Ads. In June 2021, this timeline was extended to 2023, June 2022 brought yet another extension to the 2nd half of 2024, and in April 2024 it was postponed to the beginning of 2025. Moreover, Google Chrome declared withdrawing 1% of 3rd-party cookies in Q1 2024 to provide a reliable environment for testing.

Other browsers, such as Safari, Firefox, and Edge, have already stopped supporting 3rd party cookies for retargeting ads. But from the marketer’s point of view, the fact that Google will also follow this trend for retargeting Google Ads is important due to Chrome’s over 60% market share. Therefore—how will retargeting work without cookies?