After years of uncertainty, Google says it won’t be ‘deprecating third-party cookies’ in Chrome

Google executives are already discussing this pivot with regulators including the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) and plan to do the same with the industry soon. For now, details on what this actually means remain light. And as for a timeline, Google seems to have learned its lesson from the numerous delays to its cookie-killing plans — there isn’t one.

“As this moves forward, it remains important for developers to have privacy-preserving alternatives,” Anthony Chavez, vp of the Privacy Sandbox, said in the blog post. “We’ll continue to make the Privacy Sandbox APIs available and invest in them to further improve privacy and utility.”

For those who have poured time and effort into third-party cookie alternatives, fear not: Google will keep the APIs in the Sandbox. Your work isn’t going to waste. In fact, the plan is to continue to invest in them, continued Chavez, to further improve “privacy and utility.” Plus, additional privacy controls, like the recently announced IP Protection (i.e. IP masking for privacy protection) in Chrome’s Incognito mode, will be added to the Sandbox.

“We developed the Privacy Sandbox with the goal of finding innovative solutions that meaningfully improve online privacy while preserving an ad-supported internet that supports a vibrant ecosystem of publishers, connects businesses with customers, and offers all of us free access to a wide range of content,” Chavez wrote in the blog post.

Or, to put it another way, the Sandbox isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

This could be a blessing in disguise, especially if Google’s plan gets Chrome users to opt out of third-party cookies. Since it’s all about giving people a choice, if a bunch of users decide cookies aren’t for them, the APIs in the sandbox might actually work for targeting them without cookies.

The emphasis here is on “could,” given all the technical hiccups the Sandbox has right now.

But if this does pan out, it wouldn’t be too different from what Apple did with mobile identifiers three years ago. Back then, it launched a privacy safeguard called App Tracking Transparency, which lets people say yay or nay to sharing their data or Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA) with apps and sites via a prompt.

Then again, Google might throw the industry a curveball. If the whole saga of third-party cookies has taught ad execs anything, it’s to expect the unexpected.

In the meantime, ad execs can expect Google to put on a full-court press to sell the Sandbox. It’s no coincidence that the decision to keep third-party cookies in Chrome dropped alongside an announcement about how well their own tests of alternatives performed between January and March.

The tests showed promising results:

• Scale Preservation: Advertiser spend saw an 89% recovery in Google Display Ads and 86% in Display & Video 360.
• Return on Investment (ROI): Conversions per dollar (CPD) recovered by 97% in Google Display Ads and 95% in Display & Video 360.
• Remarketing Recovery: Advertiser spend recovery was 55% in Google Ads and 49% in Display & Video 360, with better results for campaigns combining remarketing with other strategies.

The findings suggest that Privacy Sandbox technologies can help recover ad performance without third-party cookies. But let’s not break out the champagne just yet — these results are preliminary, and there’s still plenty of work to be done. Google’s well aware of this, especially with feedback pouring in from the ad industry and the CMA in the U.K.

Still, knowing that the Sandbox isn’t the be-all and end-all of Google’s plan for third-party addressability will have ad execs breathing a sigh of relief. They’ve been scratching their heads trying to figure out how this could all play out.

Somewhere between announcing the plan to ditch third-party cookies in Chrome four years ago and now, Google’s strategy got tangled between pleasing privacy advocates and keeping ad performance (and monetization) humming for the ad industry.

Publishers, in particular, have struggled to make sense of this predicament for their own businesses. Their faith in the Privacy Sandbox has been waning over the past several months. Execs told Digiday that only being able to test the Sandbox on 1% of Chrome users made the experimentation pool too small to draw definitive conclusions on its performance. Then in April, when Google announced it was delaying the deprecation of third-party cookies again, several publishers said they stopped allocating further resources to testing the sandbox altogether.

Some media execs told Digiday at the time that they were still allowing larger entities like Criteo and Index Exchange to use their inventory for larger scaled tests, but once their findings were published earlier this summer, the publishers realized that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze when it came to performing any tests in-house. And as of July, Criteo reported that the publisher adoption rate of the Privacy Sandbox was below 55% and would likely remain that way for some time. Latency issues and average ad revenue losses were two of the larger concerns with the Privacy Sandbox that publishers voiced following the reports.

“We 100% divested from Privacy Sandbox testing once they pushed the timeline on deprecation,” Justin Wohl, CRO of Snopes and TV Tropes, said earlier this month, adding that it was unsustainable for smaller publishers to be spending time or money on the Sandbox at this time.