In 2024 Google, will end the use of third-party cookies, technology that can track people across websites to target them with personalized advertising. What does this mean for advertisers in the home furnishings industry?

This will have zero effect on most Google Search campaigns for furniture stores, mattress stores, and rent to own stores.

Retargeting campaigns could be affected.

The data in GA4 will become less and less reliable and more incomplete, which will make tracking online sales back to their source more difficult.

There is little one can do to lessen the blow of this change (but the blow will be minimal).

Furniture businesses should be trying to collect email addresses from every customer and every website visitor so that they can market directly to them in the future, but that has always been the case.

For massive companies with thousands of daily website visitors like Amazon and Wayfair, and for pureplay online sellers with big volume, like CPG companies, this change will be painful. They have had enough data to allow the Google algorithm to find new customers based on peoples' online behavior. They will no longer be able to track/find those prospects as easily.

In the Home Furnishings Industry (HFI), few retailers have enough volume of website visitors to serve meaningful retargeting campaigns anyway - and this detail is often buried by ad agencies.

For most of us who remember, this will be like the Y2K scare where we thought the world might end on 1/1/2000 and nothing really happened.

The end of third-party cookies for HFI retailers will likely result in a few things:

• Like always - they won't really know which of their advertising works. Since the dawn of advertising, we've mainly had to guess which advertising works. The truth is, it all works, somewhat.
• The return to contextual-based online advertising. Instead of "retargeting" one's previous website visitors, retailers will place ads on the websites they think their customers are likely to visit - the old-fashioned way. Ad Placement will become more useful than Audience targeting on the Google Display network - for those that use that.
• Social media advertising (Facebook and Instagram) will become more important because Meta owns their potential shoppers' data. Meta doesn't rely on showing ads outside of their network of platforms, so the cookie discussion is largely irrelevant to them. They might still have trouble connecting the dots from their ads to the purchase, but they'll have robust information to target you by the things you watch, share, like, and the places you go.

There are entire businesses, even industries, that were built on being able to follow people around the internet and target only those that were likely to become customers. For them, third-party cookies going away could be devastating. The rest of us will hardly notice, other than the ads we're served will be less relevant to us.