Part 1. The end of 3rd party cookies and what it means for your marketing endeavours and customer experiences

Google announced a while ago that it would phase out 3rd party cookies in Google Chrome. This will take effect by the end of 2023, which essentially means the end of 3rd party cookies, as Googles Chrome holds the biggest market share. Other browsers like Safari and Firefox have already stopped supporting 3rd party cookies by default. 

Nevertheless, what does this actually mean for companies and their marketing endeavours? Previously companies could leverage 3rd party cookies to track their customers activities across websites and leverage this data to supplement their first party data thereby gaining insights and subsequently improving personalization of customer experiences. However, without 3rd party cookies companies inevitably have to revisit their data collection to ensure that they have sufficient first party data to gain insights about their customers. This is true for both B2C and B2B scenarios. Companies having traditional web shops will still be able to track their customers movements on their websites, which in most cases should provide them with some insights to deliver personalized engagements. However, if your company does not have a traditional web shop, because it does not fit with your business offerings, how do you then gather enough information and insights about your customers to be able to deliver personalized engagements? How do you successfully personalize your customer engagements if you cannot tap into the insights provided to you by knowing which other websites, topics, and products your customers are interested in?  

Part 2. The end of 3rd party cookies and rise of first party data