Navigating the Cookie Crumble
Understanding Google’s Cookie Policy Updates and What They Mean for Your Website
As Google Chrome progresses toward complete third-party cookie deprecation (click here), we’ve received numerous questions about these cookie policy updates and their implications for you. Here’s a quick rundown!
Two Types of Cookies: First-Party and Third-Party
First-Party Cookies: These are directly stored by the website you visit, enhancing user experience and collecting data like language settings, preferences, and analytics. They remain unaffected.
- How you experience it in real life: With first-party cookies enabled, logging into an account like Amazon saves your login information, eliminating the need to log in each time. It also retains preferences such as language settings. Without them, you’d have to log in every time and re-enter preferences.
Third-Party Cookies: These are created by other parties primarily for advertising or tracking, and are undergoing a 50% deprecation in March and full deprecation in June.
- How you experience it in real life: After visiting a shopping site, if you choose not to buy an item or leave it in your shopping cart, you may notice ads for that product following you as you browse the web.
What This Means for You and Your Websites:
First-Party Cookies: If you have a website and you want to track these items and/or offer seamless login, you’ll need to enable a first-party cookie opt-in process and handling.
Third-Party Cookies: To maintain advanced tracking, you must take several steps.
- Enable Enhanced Conversion For Web (EC4W) on your websites and all conversion points. This typically includes phone tracking, form tracking, chats, booking tools, etc. While CAMP Digital can enable this for Phone and Forms, your Chat and Booking providers must enable this for their services. Otherwise, we will not be able to observe these events. It’s important to note that the events will still occur. Still, you won’t be able to see these conversion sources, track them in reporting, or send this information back to advertising partners for campaign improvement.
- Enable Consent Mode on your websites. As privacy standards evolve, many advertisers are transitioning to modeling traffic. This will be crucial for the conversions we cannot “observe”.
What You Can Do Today
If you’re a CAMP Customer, we have already transitioned your conversion tracking to EC4W and will implement Consent Mode on your website. Contact your account manager for First-Party tracking needs, and contact your chat and booking providers for necessary updates.
It’s worth noting that this adoption by Google regarding third-party cookies is not new, nor is Google a pioneer in this change (Safari & Firefox began to implement stricter default consumer data privacy settings back in 2017). These new updates by Google, which owns most of the search engine market share, are due to privacy law updates worldwide (specifically the EU & some states like California).
In addition, the consumer privacy space is undergoing rapid changes, which CAMP Digital is poised to meet head-on, and we will continue to provide solutions to ensure proper data tracking and transparency.
Connect with CAMP
Whether you’re looking to increase your online visibility, drive more traffic to your website, or boost your conversion rates, our team of experts is here to help. Ready to explore CAMP Digital’s comprehensive solutions for your home service business? Connect with an expert today!
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