PPC - Pay Per Click Management

Google announced not too long ago that cookies will be forever banned from Google Chrome. For a lot of website publishers and advertisers that use PPC, this seemed like an armageddon moment in online advertising. Third-party cookies are where the data is stored for web users to make adverts contextualized and related to the interests of each individual web user. Without cookies, advertisers are blind to who is seeing their adverts, which makes it harder for them to target their adverts to the target markets they want.

Although the news of the cookies dying is still very recent, there are a few theories as to what is going to happen. Here are some hypothetical situations to give you an idea of what could be the future of advertising.

Google will Replace Cookies with ‘more secure’ Cookies

The most logical solution is that Google will replace the cookies with a new form of storing data that is much more secure than current cookies. Currently, cookies are a very old form of tech to store web user data, with many loopholes and security risks inside it.

The fact that Google’s revenue predominantly comes from advertising, it does not make business or financial sense for Google to make a decision that will affect them financially negative. For this reason, some people believe Google will lead efforts to replace the cookie, so the data can be stored, in a new format that is as good, if not better, than third party cookies. Whether this happens or not is another question.

Content Contextualization

One theory is to use content again to contextualize the adverts. For example, a website that is about gardening will likely do well with having adverts relating to gardening. A website about cars would do well with car repairs, used cars etc. and so on.

Content contextualization has been around for a while but seemingly died out when third-party cookies stored more relevant data to advertisers. However, we might have to resort back to this after the death of the cookies.

Big Companies Simply Win

If there are no alternatives to cookies, it could be seen that big companies win and the small fish and independent websites will suffer. This will be because large companies will be able to use their analytics of their users to showcase to advertisers the demographics and web traffic they can target etc.

This does not seem good for independent publishers, as it encourages advertisers to go to the large traffic sites and organizations, that can provide data for their users.

This goes a bit in keeping with Google’s approach to YouTube, where there has been a push for more friendly content, dictated by advertisers who wanted to advertise on the platform.

Ultimately, we will not know for sure. The great thing is, though, we all have time to prepare.