36. Not all cookies taste the same.
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If you are in marketing or any digital business, you have likely heard about cookies.
Cookie data is a crucial part of a marketer’s arsenal. It is the reason why websites you revisit remember your login details, what you forgot to buy, and the products you are interested in.
The brouhaha about cookies makes them sound like evil incarnate, but not all cookies are alike.
First-party cookies are like your local coffee shop, remembering your favorite coffee order. They are created and owned by the websites you visit and stored on your device, allowing the website to recognize you upon return. They are less invasive and used by a website for its own purposes, such as improving user experience or personalization.
Second-party cookies are your coffee shop sharing the details about your favorite coffee with a nearby bakery (with your consent). It’s first-party cookies shared between trusted partners.
Third-party cookies are like a spy following you around the neighborhood as you visit your favorite coffee shop and bakery. Advertising networks and social media plugins use them for tracking and advertising. They are the reason once you check out a product, you see ads for the same targeting you on other sites. All the brouhaha is about phasing out third-party cookies because of the inherent privacy concerns.
The end of third-party cookies doesn’t mean the end of tracking, as you will still have first-party cookies and other forms of first-party data that can be leveraged—behavioral, subscription, social, purchase, survey, customer feedback, cross-platform!
Plus, a ton of new tools are under development via programs such as Google Privacy Sandbox. I am pretty excited to see what’s in store for marketing analytics in 2025.