Let's start with news many missed.
In July 2024 Google abandoned the plan to eliminate third-party cookies from Chrome. Five years of announcements, postponements, rewritten Privacy Sandboxes, FLEDGE renamed Protected Audience, Topics API pushed everywhere — and then a reversal. In April 2025 they confirmed the new course: no automatic elimination, no forced consent prompt. User choice: the user decides, from the browser settings.
Formal result: as of May 2026, on the ~65% of global traffic that passes through Chrome, third-party cookies still work.
In the boardroom, in many Italian SMEs, this news had a precise effect: "Ah, so we can breathe. Cookieless didn't happen."
It's exactly the mistake we want to dismantle today. Because cookieless happened anyway, it's already here, and it's already impacting your digital marketing. It just came through the back door while everyone was watching the front.
The front door was Chrome. The back doors were all the others
For five years the "cookieless" discourse focused on one question: "When will Chrome remove them?". It was a collective misperception.
While we waited for Chrome, this is what was happening:
- Safari, since 2017 with Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), has progressively blocked third-party cookies. Since 2020, by default, they don't work.
- Firefox, with Enhanced Tracking Protection, has blocked them by default since 2019.
- iOS, with App Tracking Transparency since 2021, cut cross-app tracking: about 80% of iOS users choose "don't track", and the entire mobile ecosystem moved on without precise signals.
- Chrome users, after the "user choice" settings opened in 2025, in good part decided to disable them on their own. Not with the noise of a forced prompt; with the slow noise of millions of silent clicks in privacy panels.
Adding all this up, at least 60-70% of the sessions of an average Italian e-commerce in 2026 have no usable third-party cookies. For many sectors — verticals typically more privacy-mature: publishing, finance, health — the percentage exceeds 80%.
At this point, the question "will Chrome remove them?" is secondary. They're already gone where it matters. Only no one announced it, because there was no event. It was a five-year erosion. Erosions don't make headlines, but they change the landscape.
The three signs you're already paying for it
Working with e-commerce clients over the last semester, we see the same three signals in almost all of them.
Sign one: cost per acquisition on Meta and Google retargeting has grown by 30-50% in the last year. The platforms have fewer signals, must do audience matching on dirtier data, the auction rises.
Sign two: lookalike audience campaigns that worked great in 2024 today yield less than half. Without a quality seed audience (because the pixel sees less), Meta and Google extrapolate from less information.
Sign three: your Google Analytics 4 shows more and more "direct" traffic and less and less "campaign" traffic. Not because campaigns aren't working. Because we can't track them anymore — users without third-party cookies, on non-Chrome browsers or with high-privacy Chrome modes, arrive as "anonymous" and get classified as direct.
All three of these signs are cookieless. We just keep calling it "performance drop" or "strange season".
The three alternative setups we see in production
For mid-sized Italian e-commerce, today, there are three concrete directions. In increasing order of effort and value.
1. First-party data as a primary asset
The basic idea: instead of relying on Meta and Google to know who your customers are, gather the data you need yourself. Email, behavior on the site, declared preferences. All consented, all yours, all usable regardless of cookies.
In practice this means: having a serious CRM (not an Excel sheet), having a marketing automation platform connected, having a subscription/loyalty program that gives the customer a reason to identify themselves.
Esselunga, Coop, Conad built this asset in the '90s with loyalty cards. It was outdated as an idea. Now it's gold. Italian DTC SMEs — think Velasca, Lanieri, Pellini DTC — that built their customer database in the last five years, today are performing much better than average.
Cost of operation: medium. Time: 6-12 months to have it really working. Minimum investment: 30-50k between tools and team time. Protected revenue: huge, in perspective.
2. Server-side tracking + Conversion API
The technical level. Instead of delegating tracking to the browser (which now filters a lot), move tracking to your server. Meta CAPI, Google Enhanced Conversions, GA4 Measurement Protocol. These are APIs that let you send conversion data directly from your backend to the platforms, bypassing browser blocks.
You don't recover the precision of full cookie-based tracking. You recover visibility on your conversions — which is the most important thing to optimize paid campaigns. On Safari and iOS, in particular, the delta of conversions "seen" compared to pixel-only is usually between +20% and +60%.
Cost: low/medium (a good dev does the integration in 1-2 weeks). Constraint: your tech stack must be collaborative. If you're on standard Shopify, an app suffices. If you're on WordPress + WooCommerce with random plugins, it can be painful.
To do. Right away. There's no debate.
3. Contextual + creative as central lever
The long plan. If you know who your average customer is (via first-party data) but you can't find them individually anymore, you can at least find them in contexts where they probably are: content, sites, moments.
Going back to contextual advertising — buying space on sites whose content matches your audience — is an idea that seemed obsolete in 2018 and today is strongly competitive. More quality creative, because without precision targeting, communication creativity returns to mattering more. More brand-driven media, less performance-driven media.
It's a real paradigm shift. It's not done in three weeks. But it's the strategic direction of 2026-2028.
What you should NOT do
For honesty's sake, also the anti-paths.
Don't spend money on "Identity Resolution Platforms". They promise to reconstruct user identity through fingerprints and alternative signals. Technically it works in part, legally it's a minefield (GDPR + ePrivacy Regulation), and every twelve months browsers block another signal. Spending there means chasing a ghost.
Don't let yourself be sold an enterprise "Customer Data Platform" if you're an SME. The average entry-level price for a serious CDP starts around 50k a year. If you don't have a working CRM, a CDP won't help you. Build the foundations first.
Don't wait for "Google's plan". Google has already effectively said the plan is "figure it out". Privacy Sandbox is alive but little used. The truth is that the cookieless revolution has left Google's hands and is in the hands of those who own first-party data. You included, if you notice.
A note on B2B (because it's different)
Everything we've said is for B2C e-commerce. For B2B, cookieless is actually less dramatic: much of serious B2B marketing already didn't work on cookies but on LinkedIn, on content marketing, on account-based marketing. So if you're a B2B company (consultancies, software, manufacturing), cookieless is almost a non-issue — it's one more problem on your Meta/Google campaigns, but not on the main axis.
If you're B2C, it's a central problem. It is the problem.
Operational summary
In order of urgency:
- Server-side tracking — do it right away, it's the minimum hygiene.
- First-party data — 6-12 month investment, put it in the budget.
- Contextual + creative — 18-24 month strategy, rethink it with the agency.
And a final recommendation: ask your performance marketing vendor, today, what they're concretely doing on your campaigns to handle cookieless. If the answer is "we optimize the pixels" or "we do lookalikes", they haven't understood the world has changed. If the answer includes "we integrated CAPI, we connected your CRM, we revised the creative", you're in good hands.
Thursday, June 18 we move from the technical side to the creative side: Brand voice in half a day. The template we actually use in the agency. No two-day workshop, six questions, three exercises, a one-page document. And why that's often enough.
Want to understand if your digital setup is really ready for the cookieless era? Under growth hacking and sustainable growth we do operational audits of the marketing stack. Nothing oversold, just pragmatic truths. Let's talk.