The economy of privacy has shifted as consumers have taken most of their buying habits and personal lives online. Advertisers have shifted with them, moving from billboards to push ads – they have been able to do so successfully with the help of cookies. These delicious-sounding small text files allow sites to recognize users and improve the browsing experience, in their first-party form. Third-party cookies go even further, tracking consumers across the web. This enables advertisers to deliver advertising personalized experiences crafted by any given user’s preferences and browsing habits.
Got it. So, what’s the change that is happening?
Third-party cookies, love them or hate them, will soon be obsolete. In a move to protect consumer data, Google has implemented changes to how companies track users online and has moved ahead with its long-planned, substantial plan to eliminate third-party cookies for all Chrome users in 2024. At first, just 1% of consumers will experience restricted cookies, but by the end of the third quarter, third-party cookies will be completely eliminated. As Chrome is the most widely used browser, this has large implications for companies that depend on this source of consumer data to predict their behavior.
Why has Google decided to eliminate cookies?
A battleground has emerged in recent years over the topic of personal data online. Lawmakers in the EU and the United States have gone after some of the biggest companies in the world for their use of personal consumer data.
This battleground has come to the land of cookies. Consumer advocates believe that advertisers have too much access to consumer data and argue against third-party cookies on the grounds they allow collection of huge amounts of personal data – sometimes without consumers even knowing.
Google has responded with a new privacy initiative, The Privacy Sandbox, with two main aims: third-party cookie elimination and a reduction in cross-site and cross-app tracking.
What does that mean in recruitment marketing terms?
It means that recruitment advertisers (and employers who want to advertise their jobs and career opportunities) need to ensure that they are leveraging tools or partners with either cookie-less analytics or first-party tag or cookie options.
Why employers can rely on Appcast amid these changes
These changes could have impacted our clients’ ability to target their job ads, but our team at Appcast has gotten ahead of the changes. After two years of advance preparation, our product team has put protocols in place that ensure our existing and potential clients will not be impacted.
Below, we’ll break down how our solutions have been impacted and what we have done to ensure our clients do not experience a reduction in tracking insights.
Programmatic Advertising:
We pride ourselves in our “cookie-less” analytics. On any browser or device where third party cookies are rejected, Appcast supports accurate tracking & measurement using a proprietary cookie-less tracking technology that has been in place for five years.
Where necessary, though, we go further and use first-party cookies. Our programmatic solution utilizes these cookies with our pixel technology to provide the accurate attribution of applies. This technique is not unique to Appcast’s tech; it is also used by platforms where we advertise, like Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and Tiktok.
Search & Display and Social Advertising:
For our search and display solutions, we do not use third-party tracking. Google’s global site tags and conversion pixels are considered first-party tags, so remarketing and tracking strategies are uninterrupted (via Google Ads, Discovery, Performance Max, YouTube, and Gmail campaigns, for example). Bing’s UET pixels are first-party tags, using a “one-site”/global pixel that can then be appended with a conversion goal for tracking purposes.
As for social channels, Meta pixels are considered first-party tags, so Facebook and Instagram are unaffected. LinkedIn enables conversion tracking through the LinkedIn insight tag. Finally, TikTok accepts first-party tags.
As the online world of privacy develops, will Appcast be ready?
You bet! Just as we had plenty of time to foresee and plan ahead for these Chrome changes, Appcast remains dedicated to tracking changes that could impact our customers. We have begun to place changes that will protect against future changes as well.
We have enabled Appcast Apply on more accounts, allowing us to host the application flow of job seekers from native apply environments, like Indeed Apply and Apply with ZipRecruiter. This solution does not rely on any cookies.
Conclusion
While these changes may induce some anxiety, this is not uncharted territory. All third-party cookies have been blocked by default on iPhones since 2020. As iPhones make up nearly 50% of all smartphone use and as 60-70% of all job seekers are searching on a mobile device, this is something we at Appcast have already considered and dealt with tactically. For the past three years, at least 30% of job seekers have not been able to be tracked via third-party cookies.
Rather than a revolution, this Google announcement is a continuation of an evolution of web tracking that began years ago. Appcast is prepared to be a partner for our customers through this evolution and throughout all others. We look forward to keeping you in the know and at the forefront of navigating these changes successfully!
