A cookieless world is coming. It may have just gotten pushed back—again—but it’s still coming. Google has pledged to remove 3rd party cookies from the Chrome browser by early 2025. Safari and Firefox previously removed 3rd party cookies, but since Google accounts for an estimated 65% of all browsing activity, this change is quite significant. At the beginning of the year, Google disabled 1% of their Chrome cookies globally (30 million users) as they continued to work towards the September date. But just because we have more time doesn’t mean marketers should delay taking active steps to prepare. It just means we have more time to set it up and set it up right. And while the future is still unclear at this point, big change is definite. Here’s a few things marketers can do now to prepare:

1. Have good data: Your first party data is critical to have in place. This data is yours, and there’s a lot of power in it. You can use it to message your own customers to buy again, cross sell, upsell, suppress your current customers to ensure you’re reaching new people, build lookalikes of your best customers, and much more. Your data is your most potent weapon, so invest now to build it out, have segmentation options, and activate it in media.It’ll pay off in the long run.
2. Incorporate cookieless tactics in campaigns now: Is your media agency considering cookieless when setting up your campaigns? Now is a great time to test cookies vs. cookieless targeting solutions. This can help set baselines for how campaigns perform after September. Making projections and business decisions based on campaigns that cannot be replicated in the future is pure folly.
3. Cookies are bigger than ads: Most people are talking about how cookies are going to impact media campaigns, but cookies are more than just that. First-party cookies are used to store user preferences and auto-login, and these are not going away. Take this opportunity to evaluate how you are using them on your web properties—and if there are better alternatives that allow richer first-party data gathering or enhanced privacy for your users.

For media campaigns, there are still some audiences you can target when cookies are completely deprecated: first party data audiences, contextually targeted audiences, and seller-defined audiences. Your first party data audiences can be activated as described above to find your best customers. While contextual targeting might give you flashbacks to the early days of digital buying, showing up in the right place when users are in the mindset to think about your product can prove effective. Seller-defined audiences are those that vendors have collected without cookies. Good programmatic partners have been preparing for this for a while and building audiences without cookies. Be sure to ask your agency if that’s an option for your campaigns. EchoPoint Media recommends using a combination of all audiences to ensure you’re prospecting new customers, reaching them in the right place, and converting them when they’re ready.

There is still a lot to learn about what is truly going to happen come early 2025, but smart marketers are not waiting to prepare. The team at EchoPoint has been actively working to get ready and, as is our M.O., we remain open to the possibility of new and different options to fill the impending void cookie deprecation is expected to bring.