Does personalisation still work now that third-party cookies are going away?
We are a UK insurer, so I have to be cautious about what data any tool actually uses. Our previous personalisation vendor leaned heavily on third-party data enrichment, and with third-party cookies being blocked more or less everywhere now, half of its targeting quietly stopped matching.
Before we invest in rebuilding audiences in Croct, I would like to understand what the personalisation is actually based on. If a visitor blocks third-party cookies entirely, what signals are left to target on, and where is the data stored? I would rather hear the honest limits up front than discover them later
2 answers
Third-party cookies were never part of the picture here, so nothing degrades when they are blocked. Croct is privacy-first by design and targets on first-party signals it observes itself: on-site behavior, campaign source (UTMs on the visit), location, device, interests, and any custom attributes you set from your own systems.
Storage is first-party too. By default identity lives in localStorage, with optional first-party cookies if you need identity across subdomains. Either way it is your domain, not a third-party tracker, so cookie blockers that go after cross-site tracking do not touch it.
The audience conditions are evaluated in real time on each interaction, so a "visitor from a paid campaign on mobile who viewed the claims page" kind of audience matches from what happens in the current session, no enrichment feed required. The honest limit: you will not get third-party demographic or intent data appended out of nowhere, because that data simply is not there. Everything you target on is something the visitor actually did or told you.
We went through the same transition from an enrichment-heavy vendor and the surprise for us was how much of our old targeting we could rebuild from first-party signals alone, campaign source and behavior covered most of it.
If you want something to circulate internally before committing, the Croct blog has a privacy-first personalization playbook and a piece on the end of third-party cookies that lay out the first-party model in more detail. Useful ammunition for a cautious compliance review, in a good way.