Me want cookie! Or at least Cookie Monster does, but do we or do we not want cookies? Like Cookie Monster, we have shown an insatiable appetite for cookies but perhaps, our messed eager consumption has led us here.

It is now our turn, thanks Google, to learn how to survive without cookies. The question remains, are we ready to face a cookie-less future?

A cookie is a sweet baked dough treat that comes in a variety of shapes, flavors and textures. Chocolate-chip cookies are Cookie Monster’s favorite (and mine), but for those in digital marketing, cookies are much more. Cookies are small pieces of data stored on your computer by websites to remember information about you, like your login details or what items you have added to your shopping cart.

Whereas first-party cookies are placed by the website we are visiting — mainly to maintain sessions — third-party cookies are placed/used by other sites where we are not currently on. Those third-party cookies are used for cross-site tracking, re-targeting and serving curated ads based on previous browsing history and other online behavior. Third-party cookies have been controversial for a while now, primarily due to privacy concerns.

It's no secret there is a general growing discomfort around the idea that our online behavior, preferences and interests are being tracked, often without explicit consent. Nonetheless, cookies themselves aren’t harmful but many users are simply uncomfortable with being tracked. Let’s not forget there's a shift toward privacy-focused practices as a result of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and California Consumer Privacy Act. Furthermore, though cookies are safe on their own, they can sometimes be vectors for security threats.

Therefore, why all this buzz about cookies? We are starting a self-imposed cookie-free journey due to Google’s announcement to phase out third-party cookies and the subsequent domino effect in the advertising industry. And yet Google has pushed back its own predefined timeline several times. It has been four years of excuses, although the end of third-party cookies might be closer than we think.

Concerns related to cookies in the digital world primarily revolve around the following:

• Privacy: Users want more privacy into the websites they visited, searches they made and/or products they viewed. According to a KPMG survey: 86% say data privacy is a growing concern, 68% are concerned about the level of data being collected, 40% don’t trust the ethical use of their data and 30% are just not willing to share their personal data for any reason.
• User tracking: Users want more control about what information they share. In fact, 96% of people opt out of cross-app tracking when Apple released this option back in 2021.
• Security risk: Data may be vulnerable to unauthorized access or misuse, leading to privacy breaches to gather financial data or even identity theft.

To be clear, Google's decision means it won't let advertisers use third-party-cookies to track people's browsing habits anymore. Instead, Google is working on new technologies that allegedly will protect user’s privacy while still allowing advertisers to target. Here are the solutions presented so far:

• Privacy Sandbox: Privacy-focused application programming interfaces designed to allow personalized ads without individual tracking. We can broadly mention two solutions that might have some overlap in functionality:
  
  • Google Topics assigns Chrome users a set of interests based on the websites they visit.
  • FLEDGE API adds Chrome users to different interest groups based on their browsing habits.
• Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC): A privacy-preserving technology that groups people with similar browsing habits/interests, maintaining user anonymity while allowing effective targeting.
  
• Ad attribution and measurement: Google is still exploring this alternative.

Whether we are prepared or not, we should start working on other alternatives. Here are some options of what you can do as a company:

• Collect first-party data considered respectful of user privacy if it is collected directly from users’ interactions with the company's website and social media platforms, including:
  
  • IP addresses, which allow you to track users and gather information on households.
    
  • MAC addresses, which are 12-digit numbers assigned to every device connected to a network.
    
• Pursue data partnerships with other organizations to share data in a privacy-compliant manner.
  
• Use alternative tracking technologies, such as:
  
  • Server-to-server tracking.
    
  • Universal IDs, usually offered through security platforms.
    
  • Fingerprinting, a technique which allows to track users between browsers and devices.
    
  • Contextual advertising, targeting ads based on the context of the content being viewed rather than individual user data.
    
  • Cohorts, also known as a set of users who have been grouped based on a shared attribute, such as geographic location, purchases, interests, characteristics or hobbies.
    
  • Implementing data encryption and anonymization techniques.
    
  • User identity graphs, a combination of deterministic and probabilistic matching that enables to stitch together data from different sources to create a single customer profile.
    
  • Using artificial intelligence and machine learning to effectively replace cookies.

To conclude, we are going to have to move away from cookies. Therefore, our best bet is to use predictive AI tech solutions, as cookies actually do a pretty poor job of analyzing complex customer journeys.

The challenge we face is educational; people are not aware that 80% of data is incorrectly attributed by Google and Adobe’s attributions models given their focus on the lower funnel. A cookie-less future will encourage us to create more transparent, respectful customer relationships and consequentially stronger customer relationships with higher conversion opportunities.

Mercedes Blanco is chief partnerships officer at The Hotels Network and a founding member of Women in Travel Thrive.

The opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Hotel News Now or CoStar Group and its affiliated companies. Bloggers published on this site are given the freedom to express views that may be controversial, but our goal is to provoke thought and constructive discussion within our reader community. Please feel free to contact an editor with any questions or concern.

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