No More Cookies? The Changes Coming To Google Ads in 2021

By Adam

It’s long been known that Google wants to drop support for third party cookies on Chrome, and the day is finally coming. But what other changes are Google bringing in for 2021 and beyond?

On May 27th 2021, Google held their Marketing Livestream, which highlighted many of the changes coming to Google Ads in the coming months.

Most of these changes are well known to marketers, such as the end of third party cookies. In the nearly hour and a half long online presentation, there was a lot to take in.

In this post we’ll take a quick look at the important changes coming to Google Ads and how they affect digital marketers.

Cookies OUT, FLoC IN

The headline change is the end of third party cookies. Long touted as a major problem for preserving online privacy, third party cookies will be phased out by 2022.

But what about their replacement?

The Federated Learning of Cohorts, or FLoC for short, has been presented as a new way to preserve user anonymity online, but to still allow marketers to target demographics by genuine interest.

FLoC works by putting individuals under a demographic umbrella, or cohort, as opposed to keeping individual information. The theory is that the anonymity of the crowd means that no unique identifiers are kept on a specific user, but that we become part of a collective.

Is FLoC an improvement?

There is a lot of controversy around the switch to FLoC, with many maintaining that actually, it’s more of the same, or, worse, it actually gives businesses more information about you.

Privacy focused browser, Brave, which already blocks third party cookies and embedded ads, is also blocking FLoC. The reason is that Brave feels that additional information is shared without the informed consent of the user. You can read their full press release on the matter of FLoC on the Brave site.

Additionally, Mozilla Firefox and Safari will also not use FLoC when it is introduced. But Chrome still has the majority market share, with 67% of users choosing Google’s browser.

The issue for most is that FLoC presents new issues, rather than dealing with the existing problem of privacy.

As an example, if you have an account with a website, your FLoC activity will be available to them, giving this company increased insight into your online habits. An issue referred to as cross-content exposure.

So, is FLoC a total fail from Google?

Well, it does seem that the overwhelming majority of tech publications and companies are not entirely enthralled by the incoming changes to tracking. From a user perspective it’s not looking too good.

For digital marketers, it pretty much means business as usual. Google Ads will continue to target your chosen demographic and location. In fact, Google reckons that ads will be at least 95% as effective as they’ve always been. So that’s good news, right?