Google is, yet again, pushing back its plan to get rid of third-party cookies in Chrome to the back half of 2024, according to their company blog.
This is a good time to look at what you’re doing to protect your first-party cookies (these are the tags/trackers from external providers but in the context of your own properties).
This is where RescueMetrics has a few key functions.
- First-party cookie extension, enabling you to more accurately track customer journeys online (and attribute value)
- Signal loss prevention, recovering the data that would otherwise be missing due to ad-blockers and strict-mode browsers (specifically, the actions and conversions you need to measure success!)
- Conversion API installation made easy – connect Facebook’s CAPI to measure in-app performance for iOS users, and ensure effective campaign optimisation.
The image above shows data we found from a selection of sites in Australia – the key takeout is that they all face significant impacts, but each site faces a different mix of issues. If you’re targeting more affluent users, expect to see high rates of ITP/ETP issues relating to your audience over-indexing in using Apple devices. The impact of this is generally poor attribution – not giving credit to the ads that initially brought a user to your website, or giving all the credit to the last touch, even if the user has been to the site multiple times in their path to purchase.
If you’re targeting a more tech-savvy and/or younger audience, expect to see high rates of signal loss due to your audience over-indexing in using ad-blockers or browsers in strict/privacy modes. In this case, you’re typically not seeing tags fire at all, as they are blocked in the blunt approach to stop ads from showing, and your first-party data is a victim. These users may not have seen your display/video ads, so there’s not attribution issue there, but any PPC ads (Google, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc) are not blocked, so you will see the cost/clicks associated with these users, but be unable to pick up the signal when they convert. This leads to poor optimisation decisions, which can wipe out entire audience segments that may actually be valuable customers.
There’s a free trial, and it’s an easy install. Try it for yourself to see how you might be impacted.
