Did you know that your cookies are about to be depreciated?
Many are unaware of the changing times ahead
There is no doubt that Cookies have proven to be a deliciously effective tool for luring customers into the top of the sales funnel, but privacy concerns – both ethical and legal- have driven Google to announce a change in the way that they will enable the tracking of user activity.
The good news is that Google has postponed the change until the end of 2024, and ultimately, a leaner diet of direct customer contact through 1st party leads will be healthier for dealers than the 3rd party junk that the industry has formed bad habits around. However, a general lack of awareness of the changes ahead, and subsequently of proven solutions to capitalize on the shift rather than be run over by it, is likely to make the adjustment challenging for many dealers.
Anthony Chavez, Vice President of Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, states in a blog post:
“By Q3 2023, we expect the Privacy Sandbox APIs to be launched and generally available in Chrome. As developers adopt these APIs, we now intend to begin phasing out third-party cookies in Chrome in the second half of 2024. As always, you can find up-to-date timelines and milestones on the Privacy Sandbox website.”
This deliberate approach to transitioning from third-party cookies ensures that the web can continue to thrive, without relying on cross-site tracking identifiers or covert techniques like fingerprinting.”
To determine just how equipped dealers are to manage this transformation, Pure Car conducted a survey last quarter to learn more about dealers’ data management habits, and how prepared they are for the change ahead
“With all the buzz on third-party cookie deprecation, first-party data and targeted marketing, we wanted to discover how dealerships are making use of customer data.”
58% of responding dealers appear to not be well-informed about third-party cookies being eliminated from Google’s Chrome web browser in 2024. Furthermore, 55% of dealers were either unfamiliar or only moderately aware of how a cookieless landscape would affect their ability to target potential customers.
As this new reality is slowly phased in over the next 18 months, dealers will have to invest in a sophisticated effort to improve their ability to attract and optimize first party data, and to re- learn some of the tried and true practices of nurturing the personal relationship with the customer.
BDC United views this transformation as an opportunity for its dealer clients to further separate themselves from the competition. Embracing the change as an improvement in the customer experience and fostering that momentum into a seamless and fruitful introduction into a more personalized dealership experience is exactly the tac that dealers need to take to overcome the record fall off of customer satisfaction and the resulting steep decline in customer loyalty.
Scan the qr code below to learn more about how BDC United can help your dealership not just survive, but thrive on a cookie free diet
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-gives-third-party-cookies-another-year/459412/#close