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Marketers following the phasing out of third-party cookies are likely feeling a bit of whiplash regarding the actual phase out. For the past five years, Google has been anticipating ending the use of third-party cookies in Google Chrome. Surprisingly, Google said in 2024 that the move was being paused indefinitely, and recent announcements confirm that Google is not planning to drop third-party cookies anytime soon, if at all.
Even though cookies aren’t going anywhere, the back and forth has made a big impact on marketing. For the past two decades, third-party cookies have been the main pathway through which marketers learn about potential customers. Now that many companies have prepared for the end of cookies, it’s conceivable that the role they play going forward has permanently shifted. By understanding how to best use cookies as well what other methods are effective for learning about website visitors, marketing teams can make sure they are using the most up-to-date strategies for SEO.
What Are Third-Party Cookies?
Third-party cookies are pieces of code stored on the browser by a domain other than the current site. It’s typically a data broker, advertiser, or ad tech platform. In recent years, cookies have been the target of privacy concerns and regulations such as CCPA and GDPR, prompting websites to require consent for cookies each time a user visits the site. Some browsers, such as Safari and Firefox, do not collect cookies for these reasons.
The company that creates the cookie then sells the user data to other interested companies. The brand that purchased the data then uses the information to both personalize the experience for you as well as better target their marketing to you.
For example, you visit a website for a ski resort and book a ski trip for the winter. An ad tech platform collects the data from your visit and then sells it to an online ski gear store, which now knows that you are going on a ski trip. The ski gear company is in the process of creating a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign on Google and Facebook showing ski gear that may be needed at the resort you are going to, and makes sure their ads show up in your feed on those platforms.
In this example, the brand uses a common strategy called retargeting, which means showing a product on a different channel that you looked at on the businesses home page.
Other strategies include cross site tracking, which helps the company learn more about your behavior to improve their marketing to you.
For example, if you visit an airline site and book a flight, the ad tech platform has collected data on both sites to create a profile that you are traveling by plane to a ski resort. Then you go to a ski website and buy a new set of skis, so the cookies show you are also taking skis on the plane with you. The ski gear company can then show you even more personalized items, such as specialty luggage for taking skis and poles on a plane.
How Do Cookies Affect SEO?
It’s easy to think that cookies aren’t part of SEO since they are often used for advertisements, especially PPC campaigns. Brands often use cookies in very near real time to start launching a campaign for a specific user. However, each cookie contains information that can help a brand better understand their target customer’s intent, which is the foundation of a great SEO strategy. For the past two decades, many marketers have used cookies to improve their SEO.
Search engines strongly consider the user experience as part of SEO. Google only wants to rank a page high for a keyword if visitors are finding the page helpful and engaging. If a page has a low time on site and a high bounce rate, then it’s likely hurting the page ranking. Cookies can help target the issue by showing that the high bounce rate is coming from users who searched for a specific keyword. Marketers who access this information through cookies can then use the information to improve the user experience, which will hopefully lead to a higher ranking.
Key SEO Implications in a Cookieless World
While Google still collects cookies, many other browsers do not, which means marketers now have less data to work with. Even if Google Chrome continues to collect cookies, it’s likely that privacy rules will continue to become tighter, making it harder to collect this level of data from third parties. As cookies become less common, or even disappear, there are some changes that are likely to happen.
One of the biggest benefits of cookies is that they give marketers the ability to create a unique profile of a specific user and to collect data about that person as they travel across websites and social media. With less user data, SEO will not be able to fully understand intent about specific users or even broader target customer profiles. As a result, SEO professionals will be making decisions with significantly less customer data. In most cases, this means that the brand will need to create user profiles based on data collected on their own site.
Because brands will no longer have a robust user profile, they’ll need to focus on contextual SEO, which is where the ad industry is currently moving. Instead of keywords and user data, contextual SEO focuses on meaning, intent, and context. The goal is to create a topic ecosystem, such as clusters of related topics. Instead of tracking data and showing ads, a company would identify searches based on intent and then create content to fit with those intentions, such as FAQs, How Tos and Product pages. For example, instead of showing ads related to airline ski carriers, the brand would look for patterns and determine that customers looking to buy skis conduct searches on how to carry skis on airplanes. The brand can then create how to content that shows different types of carriers and provide links to those product pages.
In addition to contextual SEO, brands should begin thinking about semantic optimization, especially with the rise of AI Overviews. Brands using semantic optimization use natural language in their content and they use structured data, such as FAQS and schema markup, to help the search engines better understand the content, which makes it more likely that the content will rank high. Because Google looks for content that covers a full topic and is an authoritative site, pages using semantic optimization and topic clusters are more likely to be included in AI Overviews.
What is First-Party Data?
While changing the SEO strategy is key, the real solution starts no longer purchasing third-party data to collect your data, known as first party data. This type of data is collected by your company from people who interact with your brand and share their information. Companies can use numerous tools to collect first party data, such as Google Analytics, CRM platforms, email marketing platforms, and onsite cookies. Additionally, you can collect exactly the data that you need and have confidence that it’s from your exact target audience. Because the visitors consent to you having the data through providing it or allowing cookies, this is one of the most compliant ways to gather data.
Many brands use first-party cookies on their own site to collect data about website visitors. To comply with regulations, visitors must click a banner to allow cookie collection. The website then uses cookies to track the user behavior while on the site and then uses that information for targeted marketing. While the most common example is product views and products put in cart, the cookies can also share blog pages visited to help pinpoint topics of interest and time on site to show engagement.
For example, you decide that you need ski goggles for your ski trip and visit a ski gear website. While you put a pair of Googles in your cart, you leave without buying the item. When you go to Facebook, you suddenly see ads for the same goggles on your feed as well as other models of goggles from the same retailer. You then check your email and find an email asking if you forgot something and showing a picture of the goggles. Then next time, you go back to the website, the goggles are still in your cart to make it easier for you to purchase.
Another way to get first party data, especially contact information, is to ask visitors to share it in exchange for something of value, such as for white papers, webinars, discounts and newsletters. Other ways include chat history, quizzes and contact forms.
For example, you decide to sign up for a newsletter on another ski gear site that provides daily exercises to help get in shape for a ski trip. In exchange for this valuable information provided by the retailer, you share your email address and give consent for the company to share promotions. During the webinar, the company has participants complete several short interactive quizzes, which provide information about the customer. The ski gear store then uses your address to invite you to a free webinar on how to pack for a ski trip. After the webinar is over, the retailer gives all participants a 10% off coupon for any products purchased in the next week.
How to Use First Party Data for SEO
With the right first party data collected, you can then use the data in a cookieless world to help improve your data. The most common and most important use of third-party data is improving your overall target customer persona. With the shift to search engines focusing on intent, you can then use information about what visitors searched for on your site, what blog posts they viewed and what products they viewed to learn more about their challenges and interests. You can then use that information to refine keywords and create topic clusters, which are key for contextual SEO.
The first party data can also point out which pages are most popular to help you improve other pages. While you should consider page views, time on page is really the key metric for SEO. If users are spending a high amount of time on specific pages, then it shows that these topics are of high interest and are engaging the user. You can then look for patterns of pages that visitors spend a lot of time on. For example, ski gear retailers may learn that the pages with highest engagement are FAQs on skiing and topics on learning to ski. You can then add more FAQs to the site as well as create more skiing 101 type content. By making these changes, you can then likely improve your SEO for these pages at the same time as well as create new content likely to perform well.
On the flip side, first party data can also help you pinpoint which pages are likely not ranking well and provide insights into why. By looking at pages with low time on site as well as high bounce rates compared to higher performing pages, you can often pinpoint key differences and then work to improve the lower performing pages. Typically making these changes also improves the SEO ranking for the pages, often significantly.
Evolving Away from Third-Party Cookies
While third-party cookies may or may not disappear, that’s not the main takeaway. These methods of data collection have significant issues, especially in terms of transparency and compliance. Organizations moving to other methods of data collection for SEO, especially first-party data, are getting prepared for the likely possibility that cookies may go away in the future. But more importantly, taking these steps provides you with the exact data that you need as well as the transparency required by today’s compliance regulations.
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