Google reversed course and decided to keep the cookie. What now?

In a move that stunned the marketing world, Google has now decided to keep the tracking cookie. For years, Google has stated that they would be deprecating and phasing out their 3rd party tracking cookie. As Google does, they just changed gears.

Streamline Your Podcast Experience with Bite-Sized Summaries of Your Favorite Episodes. Delivered to Your Inbox. For Free.

Third party cookie tracking has been a main driver of business analytics to understand customers, behavior, buying decisions and more. However, Google doesn't want to dissuade customers from using their products, and more-importantly, it's still an effective way for Google to increase advertising revenue. That said, their change will give users more choice on how they opt-in to be tracked, and have more options around their data privacy. Here's a synopsis of their announcement:

1. User Choice: Google is introducing a new browser experience that empowers users to make informed privacy choices across their web browsing activities. These choices will be adjustable at any time.
2. Continued API Development: Their privacy-preserving APIs will remain available, and they plan to continue investing in their improvement to enhance both privacy and utility.
3. Additional Privacy Controls: Their plan is to implement new privacy features, such as IP Protection in private browsing modes.
4. Stakeholder Collaboration: Throughout their deliberation process, Google engaged with a wide range of stakeholders, including regulatory bodies, publishers, developers, and industry participants. Their feedback has been instrumental in shaping Google's new approach.
5. Gradual Implementation: Google says they recognize the significant impact this transition will have on the online advertising ecosystem. And as such, they're committed to a careful and considerate rollout process.

Their goal now seems to be to create a more private web experience while supporting the diverse needs of the digital marketplace. I'm interested to see how this plays out. Many people are extremely frustrated with Google's GA4 change from UA. It's still using third-party cookies for tracking, but it's much more in-depth and requires more customization to get the same level of insight that UA provided out of the box. Speaking of, we have a new analytics platform to share.

Are you fed up with the headaches with GA4? A lot of marketers, agencies, and advertisers are being dissuaded from using Google Analytics after the drastic change from Universal Analytics to GA4. Metrics Hive is a feature-rich alternative to Google Analytics, making it easy to understand your users....again!

Now, for some, keeping the third-party tracking cookie provides a welcome sigh of relief as they won't have to change their marketing structure and attribution modeling as much. For others, however, who were alredy gearing up for the change with new technology and platforms, may have the notion of buyer's remorse about new CAPEX and OPEX as they were proactively implementing the necessary changes inside their respective companies. However, my opinion, is that companies should still focus more heavily on their first-party data to model the current state of their audience. From there, they could still build out effective marketing strategies, both related to increasing revenue from internal customers, but also creating more associative look-alike seed lists to reach new prospects with similar attributes and buying propensity.

Tools and newsletters we like 🛠️

These are some of our favorite newsletters to help your businesses grow:

1. PodSnacks - Streamline Your Podcast Experience with Bite-Sized Summaries of Your Favorite Episodes. Delivered to Your Inbox. For Free.
2. Galliass - one of the most powerful, all-inclusive platforms for marketers.
3. Metrics Hive - a simple, feature-rich alternative to Google Analytics.
4. Digital Rebels - the newsletter to help readers create digital income.
5. Stacked Marketer - carefully curated digital marketing news, tech, and actionable advice, delivered fresh every weekday.
6. Owner Draw Pay Stub - your go-to platform for effortless income verification for self-employed business owners getting paid through owner draws.

How we can help 🙌

Whenever you're ready, there are a few ways we can help:

1. Data & Digital Transformation: With over 20 years of progressive technology, digital media, first-party data implementations, and more, we can help you with your digital transformation needs. Get in touch!
2. Business Resources: We have a plethora of digital products that can help you with your marketing strategy, email list building, lead generation, and more. Take a look!
3. Whether you're embarking on the journey of data transformation or seeking robust data engineering support, we've got your data needs covered with our Strategic Data Services.
4. Promote your business to 5,600+ business leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, marketers, media professionals, and more who are subscribers by sponsoring this newsletter.