Advertisers slowly acknowledge that measurement, not targeting, might be the bigger cookie deprecation challenge

As third-party cookies fade into oblivion, marketers are awakening to a harsh reality: The era of a single source of truth for measurement is over. Now, they must navigate the murky waters of determining their own truth.

This shift has been brewing for quite some time — to be precise, since about four years ago, when Google first voiced concerns about third-party cookies in its browser. Executives were apprehensive then, foreseeing challenges such as tracking user behavior across websites becoming more difficult, resulting in incomplete data, attribution issues, less precise audience segmentation and a less personalized browsing experience.

In fact, these concerns may have been in play for even longer, considering that Safari and Firefox have been phasing out those same cookies since 2017 and 2019, respectively. However, given Chrome’s dominance as the largest browser, it’s not surprising that these concerns have become more acute. Especially now that they’re actually being phased out — well, one percent of them — from traffic in the browser.

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