Intelligent Tracking Prevention and other anti-tracking mechanisms have changed the tracking world significantly. It introduced restrictions on cookies that challenge businesses that rely heavily upon online marketing, especially third-party data collection for targeting ads.
This blog post will talk about tracking restrictions that affect cookies, how they influence marketing, and how to use server Google Tag Manager to extend cookie lifetime.
3rd party cookies are being blocked by many browsers these days. The two most popular browsers that restrict 3rd party cookies are Safari and Firefox. Chrome announced that they will start to phase out of 3rd party cookies by the end of 2023. Meaning that by the end of 2023, around 80% of browsers will stop supporting 3rd party cookies. First-party cookies won’t be affected.
Let’s talk about the difference between 1st party and 3rd party cookies. To simplify, the main difference is: first-party cookies are set from your site to your domain, while third-party cookies are set from your site to other domains.
There are no restrictions on the use of 1st party cookies. 3rd party cookies gained a bad reputation because of cross-site tracking. Advertisers use this type of cookies to track users across different domains and to profile users. With the help of 3rd party cookies, big platforms can follow you around the internet and see what sites you are visiting. And in the end, use this information to show you personalized ads.
Intelligent Tracking prevention algorithms used in Firefox and Safari limit the cookie lifetime to 7 days (when cookies are set with JavaScript) or 24 hours (when cookies are set with JavaScript, link decoration used, and referring to a website is a ´known tracker´).
Most marketers use UTM tags to track campaign parameters. When ITP detects UTM tags in the URL, it decreases the cookie lifetime to 1 day. It highly affects the attribution since if a user visits your website clicking on the ad with UTM tags and converts several days later, the conversion won’t be attributed to the ad campaign.
Since cookies are deleted in 1 or 7 days, a user who visited your site 7 days ago will be considered as a new one. It will have a massive effect on the customer journey. You won’t be able to see the complete picture of what traffic sources affected the decision of a customer to make a purchase.
Comments