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🗝️ End of the Golden (Cookie) Era

🗝️ End of the Golden (Cookie) Era

⚡ Read in >2mins

Kole Ogundipe
July 12, 2023

Hello, Marketers.

Welcome to the midweek edition of The Keyword.

Today we have two important updates from Google and Apple that show where the digital marketing industry is heading…🔓

Let’s jump in 🪂

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NEWS

Why the ‘golden era’ of digital campaign reporting is over

Both Google & Apple have upcoming changes which favor user privacy, at the expense of accurate digital analytics.

Google is almost ready to kill cookies

Google’s replacement for cookies, the Privacy Sandox, is due to start rolling out in a Chrome update later this month.

Some users are already beginning to see the “Enhanced ad privacy” popup.

In a nutshell, Google will group users into ‘topics of interest’ based on browsing activity. Advertisers will only be allowed to show ads to groups of users within a selected topic.

Rather than… targeting specific individuals based on their online actions, tracked by cookies.

You can read the technical stuff, here.

Privacy Sandbox is going live in Chrome 114 - if you update you might see it now. Your first view will be this popup once you restart - "enhanced ad privacy" is the overall branding to users. 1/
— Paul Bannister (@pbannist)
Jun 29, 2023

Meanwhile, Apple is restricting more ad tracking in iO17 (coming September)

Apple will automatically remove trackers from links sent within parts of its ecosystem, namely:

Messages
Mail
Safari Private Browsing.

For Marketers, that’ll make it even harder to understand email marketing performance.

Safari has over 1 billion total users. DIGIDAY estimates that around 20% of those users in the U.S. use Private Browing.

In the same article, DIGIDAY quotes Michael Monaco.

He sums up what this all means:

“For advertisers that continue to rely on user-centric measurement, this is just one of a thousand cuts already deployed that will make measurement difficult.”

There’s no reason to think that Apple’s privacy measures will stop here.

The days of individual-based ad targeting and measurement are numbered.

Thanks for reading 👋

Please forward this edition to your team if they would find these two updates useful! Appreciate you!

Kole