Third-party cookies have become the black sheep of digital advertising. Apple’s Safari browser has blocked them. Google’s Chrome — now becoming an arbiter of ad quality — makes it relatively easy to avoid them. And some ad blockers can’t tolerate them.
Plus, GDPR will hit them hard next year in Europe and possibly elsewhere (since European Union citizens are everywhere).
Third-party cookies are utilized for various kinds of digital advertising, but one of the most basic is retargeting.
Let’s say you look at a product page for red sneakers at an online retailer’s site. Perhaps you actually add the sneakers to your checkout cart but leave them unpurchased before you browse to another site.
An ad for those sneakers could follow you for days as you visit site after site. Possibly even if you ended up buying them.
So, if third-party cookies are crumbling, are their bottom-rung implementations — retargeted ads — in the process of fading out?
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