Don’t worry about the cookie ban in the Google Chrome browser in 2024
Browsers such as Firefox and Safari have been blocking third-party cookies since 2019 and 2020 respectively. After several announcements and postponements, Google has now also started to do this gradually in January 2024. With a market share of over 40% in Germany and even over 60% worldwide, the impact here is significantly greater than with the other browsers.
Blocking third-party cookies has no negative impact on web analytics and conversion tracking. For years, all well-known providers have switched to first-party cookies or even cookie-free solutions. Only retargeting or remarketing is now significantly more difficult. Advertisers can therefore continue to measure the success of marketing measures either well or poorly. However, the reliability and quality of the measurement is affected by other factors:
- Cookie consent refusal
- Ad and tracking blocking through browser extensions
- Tracking protection measures of the browser
In France and Spain, analytics cookies may also be used on websites without consent under certain conditions. In Germany in particular, however, an exemption from the consent requirement only applies if statistical cookies are not used and the data processing is carried out in the mildest form in accordance with the overriding legitimate interest.
Attention! Data protection experts warn against the use of the new extended consent mode of Google Analytics. In his article on Google Analytics Consent Mode, Dr. Thomas Schwenke from Datenschutz-Generator.de comes to the following conclusion: “It is true that the consent mode also allows users to be recorded without cookies. However, the extended implementation of the consent mode in Google Analytics is practically useless under EU law, as it can only be used with consent.” (Translated by the author)
Depending on the solution, the consent requirement can only affect the use of cookies or the complete collection of data. Depending on the configuration, extensions such as Adblock Plus can be used to completely block the scripts of web analysis services. The tracking protection measures of the browsers, on the other hand, only restrict cookie runtimes or limit the collection of referrer links and link parameters.
What can you do?
With etracker analytics, visits and conversions can be measured without consent and uploaded to Google Ads & Co. on the server side. The option of tracking via a separate sub-domain helps against tracking blocking, protection and prevention.
In the near future, the new etracker tag and consent manager will also support extended conversions, which are based on the server-side transmission of conversions together with the encrypted email addresses of users. With this mix of data protection-friendly, browser-based and server-side systems, a sufficient database will also be available in the future to make data-driven decisions and operate algorithms for campaign optimization. This, in turn, is the basis for achieving optimum campaign performance.