In early 2020, Google announced that it would remove Third Party Cookies from its Chrome browser by 2022. Chrome will not be the first or the last browser to remove these cookies, but in this specific case, it will have a major impact on the campaigns we run. In this sense, Google has communicated a very important point for all of us who operate digital marketing campaigns: they will not limit third-party cookies until they ensure that the market can continue to work in a qualified manner.
That is why, taking into account the current and upcoming situation, and having the horizon of a #cookielessworld in 2022, brands should start looking for a plan B to carry out their digital activity without being affected by the disappearance of third-party cookies.
At Making Science, we help our clients tackle these major changes and we work every day on what we consider to be the key component of their strategies: Which is basing the strategy on their first-party data, every company possesses proprietary data and with this, we can accurately profile groups of users that we are going to impact with our campaigns.
Failure to change the philosophy of our digital strategy can be very costly and if we do not adapt we will not be able to operate or measure our campaigns properly, losing efficiency, data, and revenue. In fact, according to an internal study conducted by Making Science, we estimate that companies that do not adapt to the current changes in privacy, specifically in relation to the disappearance of third-party cookies, will lose up to 25% of their data they should be getting if they do not implement the new Privacy solutions.
Among the multitude of current solutions in relation to these privacy updates, we are mainly committed to one, Google’s Consent Mode. Which will allow you to continue measuring your ROI while respecting the consent of your users.
Consent Mode: Google’s new solution to continue measuring conversions while respecting consent rules
Asking users for explicit consent before installing cookies in their browser may lead to the loss of conversion measurement for those users who refuse to give permission.
Google’s new “Consent Mode” functionality, seeks to mitigate this impact. Therefore, it is important that we understand.
Consent Mode currently focuses on two types of consent; analytics and advertising personalization. Introducing two new variables, ad_storage and analytics_storage in the configuration will allow you to inform your tags (Google Analytics, GMP, and Google Ads) of the user’s consent status, adjusting their behavior accordingly.
It should be clarified that Consent Mode is not a CMP (Consent Management Platform), but complements the system or solution installed to collect the user’s consent.
The tags will always be executed, regardless of whether the user consents or not. The real change comes in the information they collect:
If the user has given consent, the tag will run normally, while if the user has refused consent, the tag will run without collecting or sending cookie information. In this way, you can still have basic, aggregated measurements instead of losing this information completely.
With the information collected from users who have consented, Google’s platforms will also be able to model conversions for those users who have not consented. This modeling is currently not active but is planned in their roadmap.
Additionally, functionality that can be activated with Consent Mode is the so-called “URL Passthrough”. This option enables the process of sending the click identifier in the URL so that it can still be associated with a conversion in the absence of cookies.
The implementation requires GTM or gtag to be in use and consists within the inclusion of some lines of code for the configuration.
Consent Mode arises because of the need to comply with the user’s consent without completely losing the measurement. Such a basic and necessary element allows us to analyze, improve and optimize ad activation. It is currently a beta tool that is still being developed and will progressively include more functionalities and options, such as the aforementioned conversion modeling.
Cookies configuration