Is this the death of 3rd Party Cookies?
Following the steps of Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention and privacy changes by Mozilla on Firefox browsers, the industry has been awaiting some privacy changes in Chrome for some time. As expected, Google’s announcement of the new privacy settings on Chrome Browsers happened last month in Mountain View during their latest keynote and that doesn’t come for us as a surprise. The rumored changes to Chrome focus on supporting same site cookies and giving greater transparency to users about which cookies are shared on third party basis. While these changes do not go as far as Safari’s ITP 2.2, these new restrictions will impact 3rd Party Cookie and Fingerprint tracking.
Mountain View hasn’t shared the full details yet on how their privacy settings will work but when available, Tradedoubler will evaluate the impact that this has on our tracking technology and we regularly investigate our tracking solutions to mitigate any impact for our partners. Concerned advertisers should review their tracking setups with their network and ensure they migrate to a 1st party tracking solution. It’s also worth noting that ITP 2.2 will restrict the lifetime of 1st party cookies set within the browser – the same restriction does not apply right now for cookies set using server-side code (over HTTP). Tradedoubler has code examples for server-side 1st party integrations and we can support clients through this tracking migration. A similar approach is coming from Firefox, which with its latest update will enable by default their “Enhanced Tracking Protection” to all users who will install and download Firefox for the first time; existing users will see this rolling out in the coming months.
Chrome is the latest browser to come on board the privacy wagon and Google has faced a difficult decision, to embrace privacy but not abuse its market position by restricting competitors and prioritising its own data tracking services. As always, there is confusion on the impact this will have on the affiliate channel, but this is not the first time that the whole industry faces disruption – think about the big hit that affiliates and merchants took both in 2011 and 2012 with Google Panda and Penguin updates, or more recently the introduction of GDPR.
Digital Marketing, and of course this includes the Affiliate channel, is changing again and here at Tradedoubler we continue working to ensure tracking remains at the heart of our offer while respecting privacy concerns.
