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Hello and Good Day. Welcome to this edition of LawBARD’s 5 Things. Today, we will be talking about website cookies. While these cookies are not as tasty as the cookies your grandmother made when you were a kid, they do play a significant role in website advertising and with Google’s recent announcement to stop the use of 3rd party cookies, the implications for digital advertising are significant.
Below are five things to help you be more informed about website cookies, what they do and how digital advertising will change.
- What are cookies?
- Types of cookies?
- Privacy implications
- Google’s announcement
- Implications
First Things First, What are Website Cookies?
Cookies are small text files stored on a user's computer, smartphone, or tablet when they visit a website. Cookies contain information including user preferences, session information, and tracking identifiers. They serve various functions, including remembering user preferences, enabling essential website functionalities such as shopping carts and login sessions, tracking user behavior for analytics and advertising purposes, and personalizing content and ads based on user interests.
Second, There are Two Types of Cookies. First-Party Cookies and Third-Party Cookies.
First-party cookies are created by the website the user is visiting. They enable the site to recognize the user's device and store information that can improve the browsing experience. This includes saving items in a shopping cart between visits or remembering a user's login name and password.
Third-party cookies are cookies owned by website domains other than the website domain that the user is currently visiting. They are commonly used for tracking user behavior across websites for advertising and analytics purposes. The information is used to deliver personalized advertising preferences. If you've ever done some car shopping on the web and then start getting ads from different dealers and car manufacturers, this is probably due to a third-party cookie. This digital advertising technique is called retargeting.
Third, Third-Party Cookies are Under Scrutiny for the Fact that They Often Collect Enormous Amounts of Personal Data, Without the Users Consent or Knowledge.
This data may include sensitive personal data and browsing history including information regarding political and religious beliefs, family and health information and credit card and purchase history. To make the problem worse, third-party cooking information can be used to create extensive user profiles across hundreds or even thousands of data points. This profile information can then be sold to advertisers who use it in their digital marketing efforts.
Fourth, After Several Years of Announcing Their Plan for Not Allowing Third-Party Cookies Being Stored in Chrome, Google has Started This Process and Expect to Have it in Place for 100% of Their Browser Users By the End of the Year.
It is important to note that Safari and Firefox have already place restrictions on third-party cookies, they represent approximately 40% of browser usage in the US, so the effect has been fairly minimal, however with no third-party cookies on Chrome, this will represent 90% web browsers and effectively end the usage of third-party cookies.
This ban on third-party cookies generally means ad tech firms will no longer be able to easily track a consumer’s behavior and many digital ad strategies such as retargeting will not be very accurate. It also means that consumers will have greater control regarding their own personal data.
Lastly, There are a Few Ramifications for Advertisers that are Leveraging Search Engine Marketing, or SEM.
As already mentioned, third party cookies enable companies, including law firms, to target prospective customers who have taken a specific action such as visit your website and show specific ads. This type of marketing, based on third party cookies will come to an end, and ad-buying could decentralize and become more segmented as large brands and websites start doing a better job levering their own first-party cookies to build this consumer history.
As it relates to law firms, retargeting will probably be very diminished, so other types of digital ads will take precedent, and improve the experience when a prospective visitor views their site or landing pages. Secondly, there are more website tools out there that can help enable a firm to better understand their visitors which can ultimately place an emphasis on list management and content marketing.
In other words, rather than relying on 3rd party data to help law firms target specific people or classes of people, those law firms must ensure that when individuals with needs for your services comes to your website or other digital properties, they can find the information needed to help them make an informed decision.
See you next time on LawBARDs 5 Things.
