Internet Marketers: What the Recent Google Browser Change Means — and Why You Should Care!

By Tanuj Joshi, CEO, Eulerity

If you haven’t seen the news yet, Google’s Internet browser Chrome is planning to phase out “third-party” cookies. This is a big deal for marketers big and small. Why? Google’s Chrome controls over 70 percent of the browser market — which is the front door to getting into your favorite internet destination (yes, Facebook, ESPN, insert your favorite site here). This change will affect everything you open in your Chrome browser. Firefox and Safari have already implemented something like this in the past.

So let’s break down the implications for brands and what you can do to get in front of this industry change. First, let’s start with the news.

What's Going to Happen?

Google plans to restrict the use of third-party cookies in its Chrome internet browser, in favor of increasing users’ privacy during their website usage. As a marketer, it’s a good time to get in front of this coming change as you continue to evaluate your marketing partners. How?

First, take stock of your marketing partners and how they target consumers online. If their solution revolves around installing their own cookie or tracking code to target potential consumers online, this methodology won’t be possible in the future. If your marketing partner is buying online inventory through ad exchanges where performance may be largely driven by inventory matched to cookie-d consumers, performance may likely decrease given cookie inventory typically performs better (given more consumer data is known).

If you’ve joined the marketing automation movement, ensure the platform you are using is connected directly into the digital media platforms who provide their own targeting based on user registration, habits, conversion activity, etc.

If you work with an ad agency who relies on their own cookie or pixel to target consumers more effectively, ask them what their plan is to deal with this recent change by Google and how they currently handle targeting Safari and Firefox browsers. If the answer isn’t known, well, there you go.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Google is hoping it can institute a new set of technical solutions for various tactics cookies are currently used for. To that end, Google has proposed a bunch of new technologies that may be less invasive and annoying than tracking cookies have become. These new technologies are supposed to make it easier for advertisers to target certain demographics without laser-sighting down to specific people, ensuring the infrastructure many sites use for logins don’t break. This will help provide some level of anonymous tracking so advertisers can know if their ads actually convert into sales. In essence, targeting moves from cookies to browsers.

Eulerity always knew this was coming. We believe users should have full and complete rights to their online targeting and privacy. Thus, we built our technology completely independent of third party cookies. We go a step further to not store any PII sensitive personal data of the users our ads are served to. Our algorithms view information in aggregate to make sure our customer budgets get distributed to the right ad format, in the right channel, at the right time.

In short, this is a win for consumers and their right to privacy. Consumers are the backbone behind the commercial internet. After all, if consumers didn’t make the Internet the #1 media of choice, the Internet as we know it may not be free.

Tanuj Joshi is the CEO of Eulerity, an artificial intelligence marketing platform for the franchise space. Find out more about Eulerity here.