The next 12 months will be when online retailers, brands and advertising agencies get ready for the postponed death of third-party cookies. Originally planned for 2022 and now scheduled for 2023, this will be a huge event. We can expect to see a scramble as companies realise they no longer have access to the data they currently use to target adverts and to personalise interactions with consumers visiting their websites.

Firefox and Apple have already banned third-party cookies and in 2023, the dominant player Google will follow suit. Driven by concerns about privacy legislation, Google will no longer permit cookies that track website visitors across the internet.

As companies realise a vital source of customer data is drying up, 2022 will see them seek solutions. There will be increasing focus on first-party data from a website’s own cookies which track what consumers do during a visit. Companies using AI-driven behavioural analytics with this data can learn a huge amount, segmenting visitors accurately to enable real-time interactions that are highly personalised and hit the target in terms of revenue-generation.

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