Cookies identify users online and have become a central part of online advertising and digital marketing as a whole.
Since web servers do not have any memory of their own, cookies are used to make websites "remember" user actions. As a result, they help provide a better, more personalized user experience.
In the name of building a "more private web," Google recently announced that it plans to completely eliminate third-party cookies from its Chrome browser by September 2024.
This announcement follows other cookie deprecation changes made by other major browsers dating back to 2017 (Safari, Firefox, Brave), with significant negative impact for advertisers reliant on third-party cookies.
The different types of cookies
Third Party Cookies
As the name suggests, third-party cookies are created and maintained by third-party parties.
Here are some examples of how the marketing industry uses third-party cookies:
Cross-site tracking: The practice of collecting browsing data from multiple sources (websites) detailing your activity
Targeting and retargeting: Using search activity to retarget visitors with visual or text ads based on the products and services they have expressed interest in
Ad serving: Making decisions about which ads appear on a website, deciding when to serve those ads, and collecting data (and reporting that data, including impressions and clicks) to inform advertisers about consumer insights and ad performance.
First Party Cookies
From a technical point of view, third-party cookies and first-party cookies are files of the same nature. The only difference is in the way they are created and used by websites.
First-party cookies are generated by the host domain. They are generally considered good as they help provide a better user experience.
These cookies allow the browser to remember important user information, such as items you add to shopping carts, your username and passwords, and your language preferences.
First party cookies are created and stored by the website a user is currently visiting.
They are used to collect user data for analytics, remember language settings, and store login information.
These cookies are not affected by the technical limitations related to ad blockers, nor by the disappearance of third-party data on Safari, Firefox, Chrome browsers, etc.
Eulerian marketing solutions are based on first-party data collection since the company was founded in 2006, and are at the heart of our Server-Side solutions which enable the sustainability of use cases related to cross-site tracking, advertising targeting/retargeting mechanisms, measuring the performance of your campaigns and analyzing user journeys.