The cookie apocalypse is essentially the demise of the third-party cookie. Cookie restrictions and bans have gone through various stages.
First, consumers were allowed to opt-in to cookies instead of having them mandatorily imposed on them. Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox started restricting cookies from third-party advertisers in 2013. A few years ago, Microsoft, Brave and Vivaldi also began blocking third-party cookies by default in their respective browsers.
GDPR and CCPA came in full force in 2018 and 2019.
In January 2020, Google announced its plan to deprecate third-party cookies within Chrome in three years. Apple followed suit in June 2020, announcing that it would limit the use of the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) – the mobile device ID used by advertisers for targeting, personalizing and measuring marketing campaigns.
Currently, tracking users across sites and displaying ultra-relevant ads are hyper-relevant the best way to reach the right audience through online advertising. For example, advertisers can specifically target customers who visited a hotel booking site with a travel-related product/service due to third-party cookies.
But without cookies, advertisers will have significantly less access to data than before. Tracking the customer journey of a user as they move from one site to another would not be possible. Additionally, retargeting customers based on previous interactions with ads is another feature that would disappear as a subsequence of the marketing cookie ban.
