Are you trying to figure out what’s next now that Google is removing third-party cookies in 2023?
This article was updated on April 6, 2026 with an up-to-date FAQ section.
Learn how SalesWings helps organizations flexibly collect lead, contact and account behavioral data
Are you already fully leveraging your first party data?
Until now, third-party cookies allow your customers to gain personalized and seamless browsing experiences but also let you as a marketer engage them relevanlty to reach targets. In a year, Google amongst other providers will progressively ban the use of these tracking cookies. For your marketing to be successful, first-party data – which you collect and own as a company – will become increasingly important.
At SalesWings for instance, our customers can identify their returning website visitors and collect valuable lead profiles for a more personalized and timely marketing approach.
Since they are first-party cookies, you’ll still be able to leverage them once third-party cookies are banned from various browsers.
In this webinar playback, Philip Schweizer and Nancy Kwan, Director of Digital Marketing at Bubblebox, covered:
- What are cookies (…and no, we’re not talking about the chocolate chip, oreo, or sugar cookies)
- What’s happening in the marketing landscape
- What are the future opportunities for digital advertisers
- How to prepare and move forward
Frequently Asked Questions
- What does third-party cookie deprecation mean for B2B marketing?
- How should a first-party data strategy start now?
- How do preference centers support privacy compliance and trust?
- Which customer data platform use cases should you prioritize first?
- Can personalization still work without third-party cookies?
- Where does second-party data fit in a cookieless plan?
- What should you measure during the cookieless transition?
What does third-party cookie deprecation mean for B2B marketing?
Third-party cookie deprecation means cross-site targeting, retargeting, and measurement become less dependable, so your growth model must rely more on owned data.
The practical shift is away from rented audience intelligence and toward consented signals you can collect, govern, and activate yourself. That changes how you handle attribution, audience building, frequency control, and nurture design across paid, web, and email. The strongest response isn’t to replace every lost signal one-for-one, but rather to rebuild performance around identifiable customer value exchanges, cleaner segmentation, and better coordination between CRM, automation, analytics, and sales.
Tip: start with a channel-by-channel dependency audit before you reset budget assumptions.
How should a first-party data strategy start now?
A first-party data strategy should begin with business goals, consent design, and a clear inventory of the customer signals you already own.
Start by mapping your highest-value touchpoints: forms, content downloads, product usage, email engagement, website behavior, service interactions, and pipeline stages. Then decide which signals actually improve targeting, lead qualification, retention, or expansion, instead of collecting everything by default. This keeps the program useful for marketing and defensible for compliance teams. From there, standardize identifiers, define governance rules, and create a phased plan to activate the data in segmentation and lifecycle programs.
Tip: for a practical primer, see this guide to first-party data and retention strategy.
How do preference centers support privacy compliance and trust?
Preference centers support privacy compliance by giving people clear control over consent, communication choices, and the topics they actually want from you.
They also make your data more actionable because they replace assumptions with declared interests and documented permissions. For marketing leaders, that means fewer blanket sends, better subscriber retention, and a stronger record of when someone opted in, changed preferences, or withdrew consent. A useful preference center should connect directly to your CRM or automation platform so every team works from the same consent history. It should also be easy to update, not buried in legal copy or hidden until unsubscribe.
Tip: for background, this explainer on first-party cookies versus third-party cookies helps frame why controlled, owned data matters more now.
Which customer data platform use cases should you prioritize first?
Your customer data platform should unify identity, consent, and high-intent behavior before you expand into every possible personalization use case.
In most teams, the fastest wins come from connecting website events, form fills, email engagement, CRM records, and lifecycle stage into one usable profile. That gives marketing and sales a shared view of who engaged, what they cared about, and which action should happen next. A CDP becomes especially valuable when your current data lives in disconnected systems and reporting tells you what happened without revealing usable intent. Prioritize audience suppression, lifecycle triggers, lead routing, and reporting consistency before advanced modeling.
Tip: prove one revenue use case end-to-end before scaling your CDP roadmap.
Can personalization still work without third-party cookies?
Personalization can still work well without third-party cookies when it is driven by first-party behavior, declared preferences, and lifecycle context.
In practice, that means tailoring experiences based on pages viewed, products explored, forms completed, account status, purchase history, and stated interests rather than anonymous cross-site tracking alone. This usually produces better relevance because the signal is closer to your actual relationship with the buyer. It also helps reduce wasted impressions and awkward messaging that feels disconnected from what the prospect just did. The key is to connect behavioral data to orchestration, so email, web, chat, and sales outreach react to intent quickly.
Tip: design personalization around next-best action, not just content variation.
Where does second-party data fit in a cookieless plan?
Second-party data fits best as a trust-based extension of your audience strategy, not as a substitute for strong first-party data foundations.
In B2B, it is most useful when you partner with complementary brands, publishers, or communities that serve the same buyers but do not compete directly with you. Co-marketing, co-hosted webinars, joint research, and shared gated content can all create consented audience opportunities with stronger context than broad third-party targeting. The important part is governance: define ownership, disclosures, field sharing, activation rules, and retention up front so the partnership creates value without creating confusion. Second-party data works best when your own CRM, consent records, and lead management process are already solid.
Tip: evaluate partner fit by audience overlap, data quality, and operational clarity.
What should you measure during the cookieless transition?
You should measure dependency reduction, consented audience growth, data quality, and revenue impact instead of watching only top-line media efficiency.
Useful transition metrics include the share of programs dependent on third-party signals, percentage of known visitors, form-to-profile completion rate, consent opt-in rate, preference-center usage, match rates across systems, audience activation speed, and pipeline influenced by first-party segments. You should also track where attribution confidence drops as browser behavior and privacy controls change, because that affects budget decisions as much as campaign performance does. The goal is to preserve reporting and build a more resilient operating model for acquisition, nurture, and retention.
Tip: put these measures on one executive dashboard so tradeoffs are visible early.
