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Third-Party Cookies in Marketing Cloud Engagement
Marketing Cloud Engagement uses third-party cookies to track how users interact with your websites. Most web browsers have discontinued—or are in the process of discontinuing—support for third-party cookies. To ensure that you have access to the same engagement data that you’ve always had, Marketing Cloud Engagement uses partitioned cookies, sometimes known as Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State (CHIPS).
If you use Collect Tracking Code to capture data about visitors to your websites, you don’t need to do anything to implement partitioned cookies. The cookies that Collect Tracking Code uses to track user interactions have partitioning enabled by default. Because these cookies are partitioned, they continue to work in browsers that no longer support unpartitioned third-party cookies.
Web Browsers That No Longer Support Third-Party Cookies
Recent versions of Firefox and Safari block third-party cookies by default. Google plans to discontinue support for unpartitioned third-party cookies in the desktop and mobile versions of Chrome in late 2024. After this date, Chrome will only accept partitioned third-party cookies. Other common web browsers, including Edge and Opera, are based on the same underlying code as Chrome and are likely to adopt the same features as Chrome.
Why Browser Developers Are Discontinuing Support for Third-Party Cookies
Third-party cookies are an important tool for helping web-based applications track information such as login details and user preferences. However, third-party cookies can also be used to track a user’s activities across multiple websites without that user’s knowledge. For this reason, third-party cookies can represent a compliance risk for marketers and a privacy risk for end users.
How Partitioned Cookies Work
A partitioned cookie can collect data only on a single site. For example, a user goes to a website called dreamhouserealty.com. The site contains an iframe, which brings in content from the web domain webtracker.example. The webtracker.example site in the iframe sets a cookie on the user’s device.
Later, the same user visits the website ursamajorsolar.com, which contains the same iframe from webtracker.example. In this scenario, the cookie that webtracker.example set can now access the cookies that were set on both dreamhouserealty.com and ursamajorsolar.com. As a result, webtracker.example can track usage behaviors across multiple websites and tie them back to a single user.
With partitioned cookies, webtracker.example can still set cookies on both sites. However, because the cookies are partitioned, webtracker.example can’t connect the user’s behaviors on dreamhouserealty.com to behaviors on ursamajorsolar.com.
