Have you ever logged onto an article or a website and seen that little bar across the bottom asking you to accept cookies? Apple and Google are getting rid of cookies, and thankfully, these aren’t the kind of cookies that would make a certain Sesame Street character go berserk. Today, we will be discussing Apple’s decision to get rid of cookies and how this will affect marketers and business owners.
Let’s run through a business hypothetical: I am a business owner with a marketing firm. I use cookies to help me determine how to promote my services to potential customers best. If those cookies are no longer available for me to reference, it will be much harder for me to know which consumers are ideal for me to reach.
Cookies were originally developed to serve as a time-saver by creating a little code when you visited a site, entered your preferences, and stored it on your computer for future use. They’ve become annoying tracking software, but we promise they were made with good intentions!
Cookies have become a cause for privacy concerns as they became more widespread, and users didn’t like the idea that their search history data was being used without their knowledge or consent.
Why are they going away?
Apple and Google recently announced that they would get rid of the use of cookies on all affiliated sites and web browsers to increase privacy measures for their consumers. Basically, if you’re searching the net for something specific, your search history cannot be tracked and used by related platforms. However, Google still has plenty of previously collected data from users logged into their services that can be used moving forward.
Many of you are probably happy to hear that these cookies are going away, especially if you’ve been annoyed by the sheer absurdity of the tracking these cookies provide marketers and ad campaigns.
What will this do to marketers?
The purpose of cookies on sites is to help the site owners and search engines gather data about the patterns of internet searches by consumers to better advertise products and services to them based on their search history. Marketing companies and employees use these data points as well to find potential customers and formulate marketing campaigns for them. So, you can imagine why they’d be concerned about the removal of cookies from internet browsers.
This question has been examined from both sides. Many experts concluded that many advertisers have gone down the targeting rabbit hole and have been paying extra money to chase consumers around the Internet through ad campaigns. Target marketing has become a rampant trend online, forcing many consumers to install ad blockers. This forces marketers to resort to other tactics anyway.
This move by Apple and Google will solidify the need for creative juices to flow in marketers and allow digital marketing to adopt new and improved methods in the future.
Cookies have been a part of Internet marketing and surfing for a long time. It will be fascinating to see what digital and target marketing will become once that data is no longer used openly.
