Blog about Digital Advertising & Marketing Technology

Attribution: Łukasz Włodarczyk, Private Ads Team Leader and Director of Global Inventory Partnerships, RTB House.

Ever since the announcement of “Privacy Sandbox” proposals, RTB House has perceived them as potential long-term, sustainable solutions supporting legitimate advertising use cases while respecting user privacy. Since January 2020, we have put every effort into making our platform fully compatible with the Privacy Sandbox vision.

We observe a confusion on the market regarding how changes to cookies will affect the user experience in retargeting. In this article, we will focus on the user’s perspective, starting the journey from the advertiser’s website through what is happening in the user’s browser, ending on the publisher’s website.

We have previously presented what users will see in a cookieless future, what products will be displayed, and the end results—the visible consequences of the proposed changes to third-party cookies.

In this article, we would like to focus on what is happening behind the scenes.

Imagine a world without personalized ads. Brands would be forced to build generic messaging and throw it into the void, praying that it connected with someone. Customers would be less likely to find the products they actually want and forced to settle for whatever they happened upon online. Personalized ads help companies connect with people who actually want their products and save consumers from wasting their time on irrelevant content.

However, there’s a new challenge on the horizon. Consumers have become increasingly privacy conscious, and as an industry, we have had to find new ways to personalize our content to consumers while also respecting their privacy. This guide will walk you through personalized ads and how they will function as we move towards more privacy-friendly personalized ads.

In January 2020, Google announced that it will end support for third-party tracking cookies in the Google Chrome browser “within two years,” signifying major changes for retargeting Google Ads. In June 2021, this timeline was extended to 2023, June 2022 brought yet another extension to the 2nd half of 2024, and in April 2024 it was postponed to the beginning of 2025. Moreover, Google Chrome declared withdrawing 1% of 3rd-party cookies in Q1 2024 to provide a reliable environment for testing.

Other browsers, such as Safari, Firefox, and Edge, have already stopped supporting 3rd party cookies for retargeting ads. But from the marketer’s point of view, the fact that Google will also follow this trend for retargeting Google Ads is important due to Chrome’s over 60% market share. Therefore—how will retargeting work without cookies?