A Necessary Switch as Google Disables 3^rd Party Cookies

Google’s commitment to disable 3^rd party cookies in its Chrome browser by the end of 2024 (about 3 years later than other browsers) will mark the final death knell for audience targeting in pay-per-click advertising that use the data gathered by those cookies.

In this blog post we take a pragmatic view of the upcoming change, and assert that it won’t have much affect at all, for a variety of reasons but particularly if you change your approach to more fully embrace zero party (i.e. direct from customer) data.

Google’s change to improve user privacy is such big news primarily because ~65% of all browsing across the world is performed using the Google Chrome browser according to current statistics.  Therefore, it follows that a change in Chrome will have a huge impact.

However, if you are worried about privacy of your personal data, it’s important to realise that Google is not the only company facilitating the profiling of customers through online means. Profiling of customers by collating disparate actions and signals is being performed by many large corporations.  This is done to provide a more personalised user experience, and achieve higher sales at a lower cost, and more efficiently, by talking to the right customers at the right time.  The big global technology companies are under a lot of pressure to do something about handling privacy better, and that’s why Google is finally taking action.  As you will read later in this blog, there are arguably worse actions than allowing 3^rd party cookies.

What is a 3^rd party cookie?

A cookie is a small piece of information that a website puts on a user’s computer to help the website operate well e.g. to remember where you were last viewing.

A 3^rd party cookie is a cookie placed on the website visitor’s computer after being generated by another website (the 3^rd party).  Website visits are tracked and sent back to the 3rd party who created the cookie. It allows the 3^rd party to track the visitor’s overall online behaviours, interests, frequently visited websites, etc. With this detailed data, the 3^rd party can build robust visitor profiles that can be used to retarget past visitors and drive them back to your website.

A 3^rd party cookie might be found on a desktop computer, tablet, mobile phone.

3^rd party cookies are generally owned by advertising platforms and social networks to track users across different websites and digital information platforms (e.g. digital TV, world-wide-web, social media platforms etc).  Advertising platforms and social media sites rely heavily on profiling to decide which content to show users, including ads.  In addition, such rich user profiles can be sold to other companies.

3^rd party cookies may sound relatively harmless (who cares what websites you have visited and which ads you clicked on) until you start to see the implications play out in the real world.

How Will My Advertising be Impacted?

It could be argued that if you are relying heavily on pay-per-click advertising in platforms that are dependent on user profiling to deliver high conversions, that your digital marketing campaigns will be much less successful when Google switches off 3^rd party cookies.

However, Google is working on alternatives to ensure that their PPC advertising platform still gives great results to advertisers after 3^rd party cookies are disabled.

I expect that the impact on your business will be negligible if you are already:

• Primarily placing online ads in relation to search terms, and rely less heavily on profiling, such as interest groups of searchers. Geographical targeting will still function, even without profiling.
• Utilising contextual ads, that is, placing your ads within web pages containing content related to your ad. This can be configured for Display Ads in a Google Ads campaign. Such ad placements may be considered more favourably by website visitors because the ad relates to the content they are currently looking at, rather than a unrelated ad (i.e. an ad targeted at a profiled interest which may feel like you are being spied on).
• Utilising Google’s new Customer Match Lists, which involve uploading the data you have collated about your customers or leads into the Google Ads platform for the purpose of re-marketing. In addition, Google will use this for showing your ads to lookalike audiences. As an aside, many small businesses will not use the Customer Match List feature because of:
  • The possible privacy implications – a business uploading customer data into Google is required to make this clear in their privacy policy.
  • Lack of customer data – you need at least 1,000 records before you can upload a Customer Match List into Google, or
  • Being in a category where Google prohibits the use of Customer Match Lists e.g. health industry.
• Investing in SEO. Your search engine ranks have nothing to do with 3^rd party cookies.
• Utilising significant “owned” digital assets e.g., email / SMS database of your leads and customers, which you enrich with knowledge about your customer to allow you to segment and target your messaging. This is also referred to as Zero Party data.  We’ll discuss this more below, but if you are looking for a platform for bulk email and SMS marketing, we recommend Enudge which will also help you to enrich your data based on contact interaction with your information.

Alternative 3^rd Party Profiling

The fact that Google is disabling 3^rd party cookies will have little to no impact on the following practices:

• An online digital industry exists that allows companies to buy data from a data broker to enrich your owned customer data, allowing you to know more about your customers. Many Australians are unaware that some large Australian companies share their data with other corporations, via “clean rooms,” so that they can enrich their own data. This is down to the level of email address, physical address, phone number, name etc. For more information you might like to read this eye-opening article: “Thought your doctor’s visit was private? Australian data brokers have your data, and they’re not afraid to use it.”
• Digital TV, where the signed in user is served ads applicable to their demographics, obtains profiling information from many sources, including apps on your mobile device. Minimal impact is expected as a result of Google turning off 3^rd party cookies.

In addition, Google is taking so long to turn off 3^rd party cookies precisely because they need more time to find alternate ways to achieve the benefits they are presently delivering to online advertising through deeper profiling.

It is expected that these alternatives will be less accurate in predicting which users to show which ads, but Google has claimed that the alternatives will be 95% as accurate as the current tools.  The description of Customer Match List functionality above is an example of an alternative.

Another example of an alternative is called “Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC)” which targets a general cohort rather than individuals.  This is a replacement for interest groups.

Even so, digital marketers are concerned that lower accuracy for ad targeting will equate to higher advertising costs.  If that actually plays out, then it will be vitally important for businesses to employ more marketing using “owned assets” and the techniques described above.  The earlier you start enriching your owned assets, the better.

Zero Party Data

Growing or enriching your owned assets does not need to involve clandestine enrichment through other corporation’s data via clean rooms.  Over the last few years, in response to privacy concerns and new privacy legislation, there has been a rise in businesses requesting additional information directly from their customers, so that the business can provide more personalised offers and interaction.  Customers have been very positive about this approach.

Using sweep stakes style competitions to directly request information from your customers, with the guarantee that the data will not be sold on to anyone and will be kept securely, is a practical example.

A HBR article reported about one example of this strategy: “Those campaigns achieved open rates above 50% and click-to-buy rates nearing 20%, representing increases of 250% and 33% respectively compared to their prior cookies-based campaigns. They also used this data to define more than 50 incredibly granular audience segments for their ad campaigns, which resulted in engagement rates that were on average 5.7 times higher than campaigns using Google and Facebook’s interest-targeting tools (tools which primarily leverage data from cookies).”  (Source: “Say Goodbye to Cookies” HBR)

At Contactpoint we have always encouraged our clients to directly source and securely store rich data to support their customer relationships through the use of Custom Technology.  If you would like to improve your customer engagement for the future, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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Last month we wrote a blog post about an infrequently used search engine optimisation (‘SEO’) tactic – structured data.  Whilst the implementation of structured data is a very unobtrusive SEO tactic, being hidden behind the page and picked up only by search engines (mainly Google) to understand your content better, there are many SEO tactics that do impact of user experience.

At Contactpoint we have always tried to take a very balanced approach to SEO; balancing user experience with achieving #1 in Google.  There’s no point getting people to find you, only to have the new visitor to your website sigh and leave because your content goes on and on, and doesn’t get to the heart of their problem.

Google has always been driven by giving searchers a great experience also, which is why they are constantly expanding and refining their algorithm / factors that determine search engine ranks.  For example, Google has been recently emphasising additional metrics such as Largest Contentful Paint, or how long it takes for the largest element in a particular web page to load and therefore be visible by your website visitor.  There are many new metrics in this category called Core Web Vitals.

The emphasis on user experience + SEO has been picked up by the digital technology industry recently, to arrive at a new buzz word: ‘Search Experience Optimisation’ or SXO for short.

This is in contrast to the recent accusations against Google, asserting that Google has ruined the web.  The assertion is that a result of web masters focusing heavily on SEO to ensure their website is found (to get necessary visitors, sales & leads) and pandering to Google’s algorithms is detracting from user experience.

Some examples of how SEO might reduce the experience of website visitors are:

• Content that shifts too much on page load e.g. sophisticated animations, can lead to Google determining your website is a poor user experience and therefore should rank lower. Beautiful animations should have an accessible alternative for people using screen readers and the like to consume your website, however removing movement to placate Google is certainly leading to a more standard looking world wide web.
• Headings, from an SEO point of view, need to include your target search terms, so headings like “Welcome to XYZ – leaders in Cybersecurity Melbourne” are more commonplace … which isn’t exactly an exciting heading. A more creative writer might prefer “Let’s get your Cyber Risks Under Control” but the term ‘cyber risks’ might not be searched upon so the heading gets replaced.
• Many Headings. Breaking up your content into short sections of text with search term laden headings can be helpful, but it can also make you feel like the writer is trying to compensate for your short attention span, or thinks you are a moron.
• Numbered lists are found to be very popular by searchers, hence the deluge of blogs posts on topics such as “10 best places to stay in Brisbane” or “7 tips for achieving email delivery into the Inbox”. These can still be interesting reading, but the content often becomes more generic as the writer seeks to comply with the structure of the headline.  This style of writing can make the reader feel like they are consuming soundbites or formulaic writing rather than delving deeply into a topic.
• Long Lists of Locations are very unfriendly for website visitors (but can be used as an SEO tactic). Who is going to search through a list for their suburb, when instead they could look at a map with an area selected indicating where they service?
• Click Here links are not optimal for search engines. An optimised link will have the search terms within it (among other characteristics) and so as an SEO writer you need to go to great lengths sometimes to rewrite a sentence to ensure your clickable text is actually the target search term for the page.  This, however, may not be the most obvious text for the reader to click.
• Internal Links are very important to help Google to navigate through and index your website. Each internal link gives you the opportunity to help Google understand what the destination page within your website is about.  However, if you overdo the use of internal links, you can make it very distracting for the reader.  A paragraph with the 3 different hyperlinked text can make a reader feel like they have to click on each link, go and read that page, and then come back and keep reading … your killing their ability to keep their train of thought on what they are reading.  Either that, or they decide never to click on any link you provide … and likely click away and go to someone else’s website that is less annoying.
• The popular Lazy Load feature, whereby the reader simply scrolls up to see the next set of products or items, may in fact be harming your optimisation, because it’s harder for Google to navigate and therefore index that content. Instead, you might opt to employ pagination, that is, a collection of page number links along with Start and End links.
• The Reading Level or complexity of your language is another ranking factor. Google ranking may favour simpler language, which includes shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, less complicated words.  While making your language more accessible to a wider audience isn’t necessarily a bad idea, there is a time and a place for using more sophisticated language expected by your industry or an organisation of a certain standing.
• Mobile First websites often lead to the desktop version looking like they are appealing to a two-year-old with vision impairment. Google is very keen to ensure that the websites high in the search engine results provide visitors using a mobile phone with a great user experience.  However, we believe it is a mistake to not take the time to provide a great user experience for both mobile and desktop   You can fit more information onto larger desktop screens without having it look cluttered!

The abundance of landing pages, that is, the destination of Google Ad clicks, have similar reduction of enjoyment for the reader … but that’s a topic for a separate article!

So, what can be done about this situation?  How can you still rank well in Google, without making your website read and look like every other website, and annoy your visitor or harm your reputation with all the issues described above?

Perhaps an even more fundamental question is, “If Google are wanting to improve user experience, why can’t Google’s measures (which SEO experts review and try to improve upon) actually lead to better user experience across the web, as opposed to websites full of useless content, and vanilla website designs?”  We won’t try and answer that question here – another topic for a separate article!

Before we get into SXO, it’s important to acknowledge that there are some organisations for whom search engine ranks are unimportant.  For example, businesses who aren’t looking for any new customers, or who have an abundance of new visitors coming from means other than web searches e.g. foot traffic, referring organisations, well-known brand names for whom people go directly to their website, and more.  For organisations in this luxurious position, they can largely ignore the search engines, and focus solely on user experience.

For every other organisation, who needs to rank well in the search engines because it is an important source of leads (and you don’t want to solely rely on throwing large amounts of money at Google paid advertising), Contactpoint will help you with our pragmatic approach to balancing user experience and SEO.  As I mentioned at the top of this article, we’ve been practising SXO ever since we began decades ago.

In a nutshell, we understand each and every tactic that can be employed to improve your ranks in the search engines (and there are many that don’t fall into the pitfalls described above), and apply those to your website judiciously.  We keep your audience firmly in mind when employing any SEO tactic to ensure that the reader isn’t going to be put off by the way the tactic has been implemented.

For example, we might write content that incorporates recommended semantic terms (that’s content that Google expects to see around your search terms, so that it knows what your web page is about), but after doing so we will step back and read the content as if we are the website visitor, and make adjustments as required to ensure that the content is clear, in natural English, and doesn’t read like a ploy to achieve search engine ranks.

From time to time, while delivering our SEO service to our clients, we will explain the trade-offs and allow you to choose how aggressive or otherwise we implement a particular SEO tactic.  For example, whilst content higher up in a particular web page is given more weight by the search engines, it may be appropriate to employ certain SEO tactics lower down in the page where we expect that a website visitor is rarely going to read.  That can be risky, but tools that measure user behaviour can provide the data to inform such decisions.

Has your website been polluted or penalised by Spammy SEO?

Contactpoint is sometimes asked to take over a website which was previously “optimised” for the search engines using even worse tactics than those described above.  These include keyword stuffing, content published on irrelevant blog sites, dubious backlinks through link farms and low authority directory sites, to name a few.

We can certainly help in such a situation, however it can take longer for your website ranks to improve, because it takes time for Google to trust your website – you’ve been penalised.  It’s best not to fall foul of promises for “guaranteed #1 ranks” from a low-cost organisation, who will use any and every tactic to achieve short term ranks.  This is just another reason why Contactpoint has employed SXO forever.

A better way to Optimise for the Search Engines

At the risk of writing content just for the search engines 😉 I wanted to repeat that Contactpoint is very careful to take a holistic approach to all aspects of our work in digital technology.  We are a provider of custom technology – which includes websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications – as well as digital marketing.  SEO is just one of our digital marketing services, and not the hammer with which we want to hit every (problem-perceived-as-a) nail.

You can trust us to implement SEO for your organisation in a way that does not harm user experience, and that presents your organisation to your target audience, in the right way to achieve your goals for your website.

If you would like to have an obligation free conversation about SEO, SXO or UX of your website, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

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