Cookies have become a hot topic of conversation. But what is a first-party cookie? And what is a third-party cookie? And perhaps most importantly, what is the difference between first-party and third-party cookies?
When you visit a website, information is collected about how you move around the website, what you do and information about you. This is done via first-party cookies. This data is stored by the same company whose website you are visiting.
Imagine you are on a website to look at coffee tables. You find some tables you like and heart them. But the decision on which coffee table to choose doesn't happen overnight. You close the page and think about it some more, maybe talk to your partner. A few days later you go to the same website. When you get back to the website, all your heart-marked coffee tables are still in your list. This is because a first-party cookie has saved this information so that you don't have to look up all the coffee tables again and so that you have a seamless experience.
The same thing can be achieved by "forcing" users to register an account, which is becoming quite common. So that's an option, the advantage of a cookie instead is that the user does not have to give up information about themselves and take the time to create an account, just to be able to, for example, favorite a product or product and that the site remembers the history, etc.
Get to know your visitors
Save choices that the visitor has made, for example, heart-marked an item or put a product in the shopping cart.
Create a seamless customer experience by saving preferences such as language selection.
Third-party cookies do exactly what first-party cookies do, they collect information about you and your behavior. However, unlike first-party cookies, this data is not managed and owned by the company whose website you are visiting. It is managed and owned by a third party. This is to then, based on your behavior, be able to, among other things, display relevant ads to you when you then click on.
Imagine that you visit a website to look for shoes. You browse the website for a while, click on a few shoes and add a pair of shoes to your cart. Before you're ready to pay, you change your mind and click off the page. After a few days, you see the shoes you had been looking at and put in your shopping cart advertised in various places, such as Facebook. This is no coincidence. The reason you are now seeing these ads is that your browser stored a third-party cookie and is using this information to send you targeted ads.
Retargeting
Personalized ads
Targeted social media ads
Second-party cookies are cookies that are transferred from one company to another company via some form of data partnership. For example, a brokerage firm may sell its first-party cookies, along with other first-party data to moving companies, insurance companies or perhaps alarm companies.
You can't mention third-party cookies without talking about the death of cookies. Last year Google announced that from 2023 they will no longer support third-party cookies in their Chrome browser. This has led to discussions about the future of tracking and many wonder how to tailor communications when this, our most common way of tracking users, disappears.
But we can rest assured. The death of the cookie does not mean the end of communication as it is today - there are existing technologies that can be used to achieve the same results. First-party data will also become even more important when cookies disappear. Below are some examples of what is predicted to replace cookies.
Contextual marketing
An automated process whereby communications are matched with relevant digital content. This means placing the communication together with content that the target audience is interested in. In this way, third-party data is not needed and the information about the user is not tied to a single individual.
User cohorts with Google's first-party cookie
Google's first-party cookie creates cohorts (groups of people) who share the same interests and preferences. No one is tracked on an individual level, but marketing is targeted to the group.
Progressive profiling
This means that through your CDP or Marketing Automation platform, you collect information about your users in small pieces so that the information comes directly from the user himself. All collected data is then first-party data and can be used to create relevant content for your users.
Location data
Through location data, certain attributes can be linked to groups of users and marketing can be based on these attributes.
And we will probably soon see more smart solutions that help us on our journey towards creating the very best customer experience!