Your cookies are crumbling; and for once, that’s a good thing.

It wasn’t that long ago that many consumers didn’t even understand what cookies were or why they should care. Of course, these days, everyone knows about cookies—just in time to watch their demise at the hands of new government regulation and consumers’ own behaviors.

Mobile Cookie Crusher

Research continues to see an increase in mobile browsing in recent years, peaking at 52.2 percent of total worldwide browsing in 2018. This trend is one of the biggest factors affecting cookies as a campaign tracking tool.

On mobile devices, where unique device IDs tell websites who’s visiting, there’s less need for invasive cookies that surreptitiously track user behaviors—the phone provides all the goods. From a marketing attribution standpoint, this is great news. Cookies were a workaround solution for tracking user behavior across traditional browsing channels, but thanks to mobile, companies have access to more attribution tools than ever before.

It’s no coincidence that the rise of mobile browsing is aligned with an increase in privacy concerns. With our mobile devices, we’re giving applications more data than ever before—GPS locations, address book info, device storage, and more. And while these features open up some great marketing strategies, such as GPS proximity marketing that ties a business’s digital presence with its brick-and-mortar store, this data ubiquity presents some challenges too.

Amidst privacy concerns, governments across the globe are taking a stand on how companies leverage user data, with the biggest targets being the cookies themselves.

Cookies Are Personal Data

The use of cookies is already governed by particular rules. But the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), set to go into effect on May 25^th 2018, is pushing this even further by clearly delineating the role of cookies as personal data. Does this mean cookies are done for? It may take some time, but we see this as the inevitable outcome. The mobile eclipse will continue to push desktop-centric attribution tools to the background in favor of newer solutions. And for marketers plugged in to the latest mobile marketing solutions, this can only be a good thing.