A Guide To Cookies: What They Are And How They Work

Third-Party Cookies: What They Are And How They Work

Third-party cookies are a way for marketers to track information about your web browsing activity. These tracking codes are placed on the computer of a web visitor after being generated by another website other than your own. When a web visitor visits your site and others, these third-party cookies track this information and send it to the third party who created the cookie -- which might be you (marketers)

If you're an advertiser, third-party cookie data allows you to learn about your web visitor's overall online behaviors, such as websites they frequently visit, purchases, and interests that they've shown on various websites. With this detailed data, you can build robust visitor profiles. With all of this data, you can then create a retargeting list that can be used to send ads to your past visitors or people with similar web profiles.

Want to visualize how third-party cookie data might work? Say you research a particular smart TV on Amazon. Then, you go to another site later in the day and see an ad Amazon advertisement for the same exact product. If you aren't on an Amazon-owned site, it's very possible that this advertisement was triggered by third-party cookie data.

While first-party cookies are accepted automatically, visitors must be informed that they are accepting a third-party cookie due to the amount of data that companies can retain from them.

The bottom line? If you're just aiming to track your website's visitors' behaviors, preferences, and basic demographics only while they're on your website, you probably won't be deeply impacted by this change.

However, if you're a marketer that relies on robust data for online advertising, pop-up ads, or a pinpointed audience-targeting strategy, you'll need to continue to follow the news around this Phase-Out, and consider alternative first-party strategies, as the phase-out nears.