For years, placing cookies on a visitor’s computer gave companies an easy way to not only customize a visitor’s website experience but also deliver highly targeted ads on third-party websites. 2022 will start to bring big changes to this paradigm. Responding to increased regulation and privacy concerns, Google plans to start phasing out third-party cookie support for Chrome. With Chrome’s 67% of the global browser market, that will dramatically impact advertising.
Not everything will change. Companies will still own their website audiences. Our SharpSpring and HubSpot users will continue to be able to capture page visits and click-throughs on the individual level. This provides a great way to segment audiences, creating lists for email campaigns and to customize your website with dynamic content.
With the sunset of individual third-party cookies, companies won’t be able to target at the customer level; targeting will be at an aggregated group level. Google has announced a two-stage plan, starting in late 2022. According to Google “During Stage 1, publishers and the advertising industry will have time to migrate their services. We expect this stage to last for nine months, and we will monitor adoption and feedback carefully before moving to stage 2. Stage 2 (Starting mid-2023): Chrome will phase out support for third-party cookies over a three month period finishing in late 2023.”
SharpSpring retargeting users will continue to be able to segment audiences based on customer profiles (including fields like application and product interest) and online behaviors (clicks and page visits) and to serve ads on specific websites (including nature.com and researchgate.net) extending well into 2023. At that time, third-party cookies will be phased out and an API-based approach to targeting using cohorts will be phased in. As details are announced by Google, we’ll let you know how that impacts ads and how we’ll respond.