First-Party vs. Third-Party Cookies: What To Know

Privacy is a top concern in 2025, as consumers become ever more aware of how marketers track their online behavior. Although Google dropped its cookie deprecation plans, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) remain in place. Marketers are increasingly seeing the need to shift to first-party tracking for gathering actionable data on their customers, but what is the difference between a first-party cookie vs. a third-party cookie? This guide will help you understand the features of each.

First-Party vs. Third-Party Cookies: Key Differences

Marketing Goals	1st Party	3rd Party
Personalized user experience	✔️
Reliable data	✔️
Customer retention and loyalty	✔️
Cross-site user tracking		✔️
Retargeting and remarketing	✔️	✔️
Multichannel ad campaigns		✔️
Audience segmentation	✔️	✔️
Personalized advertising	✔️	✔️

What Are First-Party Cookies?

A first-party cookie is a small piece of code that’s stored on your device when you visit a website. This tracking is specific to that website. The code allows the website owner to monitor your interactions while you’re on the site, including products viewed, items added to your shopping cart, and login details.

Benefits of 1st-Party Cookies

You’ll find that first-party cookies bring several benefits to your business. They include:

Enhanced User Experience

For the website visitor, first-party cookies make life easier. Using first-party cookies, a website can remember your login details, language settings, and even shopping cart contents if you add items while not logged in.

Reliable Data Collection

On the marketer side of things, first-party data tends to be more reliable than information collected through third-party cookies.

Privacy Compliance

So far, first-party data has not endured the same crackdowns seen with third-party data. This gives marketers more confidence as privacy restrictions impact other areas of their business.

Considerations With 1st-Party Cookies

First-party cookies do create some challenges, though. It’s important to be aware of these challenges to ensure the effectiveness of your efforts. Those considerations include:

Limited Cross-Site Tracking

The biggest downside of first-party cookies is that they are limited to your website. You won’t gain insight into what your website visitors do when they leave.

Data Collection Challenges

In order to track data from your website, you’ll need a customer data platform and advanced analytics tools. These solutions will ensure you’re not only gathering information, but that you’re also able to put that information to use in your marketing efforts.

What Are Third-Party Cookies?

A third-party cookie is also a tracking code, but in this case, the code follows the user across all online activities. If you place a tracking cookie on a user’s device, you’ll be able to gather data on that device moving forward. The function of a third-party cookie is to collect user data so that you, as a marketer, can deliver more relevant ads.

Considerations With 3rd-Party Cookies

Third-party cookies also bring plenty of challenges in 2025, and marketers need to find innovative ways to overcome those challenges. They include:

Privacy Concerns

Consumer awareness of online tracking has grown in recent years, and with that growth comes concerns. Marketers are realizing the value of transparency when it comes to customer privacy, and this makes using third-party cookies challenging.

Browser Restrictions

Both Safari and Mozilla Firefox have deprecated or phased out cookies, leaving Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge as the only major browsers still allowing them. Even though they’re enabled by default, users have the option to block cookies. This has only increased the number of users who simply can’t be tracked.

How Are Marketers Navigating Third-Party Cookie Deprecation?

Most marketers are turning to technology to get around the loss of effectiveness of third-party cookies. Here are a few ways they’re pivoting to better reach customers in a privacy-focused consumer market:

Leveraging First-Party Data

As data collection through third-party cookies has become more challenging, marketers are shifting to first-party data. But Bennett Barrier, CEO of DFW Turf Solutions, stresses that small businesses need to take a look at how they’re collecting that information.

“This is what small businesses are not hearing nearly enough: The best first-party data does not come from cookie consent pop-up banners,” says Barrier. “It comes from people opting in and sharing their data through loyalty programs, special content, or interactive activities. And it’s worth it: An Econsultancy study indicated that companies using first-party data for personalization saw a 50% increase in revenue compared to companies that used third-party cookies.”

Exploring Alternative Targeting Methods

Alternative options like contextual targeting and identity-based targeting are emerging as frontrunners for advertisers’ attention. As Loris Petro, marketing strategy lead and digital marketing manager at Kratom Earth, explains, with contextual ads, the ad is placed based on the content a user is viewing in the moment, instead of using cookies to track their activity across multiple websites.

“This is effective because it connects brands with people who are already interested in certain topics, without needing any personal data to do it,” explains Petro. “But if you want to make this strategy even more effective, you should create content that interests the right audience. If a website consistently pulls in readers who care about a specific topic, it becomes a prime spot for relevant ads.”

Using tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI) can help you take your targeting to the next level by using past activity to predict future behaviors.

Addressing Search and Social Challenges

Traditionally, marketers have focused on two channels for both paid and organic reach: Search and social. Search has been the easiest way to grab consumers looking for specific products and services, while social has offered a direct path to customers. However, Eyal Pincu, VP of advertiser products for Taboola, finds that search and social have become more challenging in recent years.

“Advertisers repeatedly face the same dilemma: Search and social channels deliver results, but the path is getting steeper,” says Pincu. “Costs are skyrocketing and creative fatigue is a persistent challenge, causing advertisers to reach the point of diminishing returns faster than ever. The bottom line is that advertisers want and need a performance channel that can deliver measurable results at a scale that drives significant, near-term, needle-moving growth for their business.”

New tools have emerged to address these challenges, and marketers can put them to use to both answer consumer questions and reach customers more directly. AI can take contextual search to the next level, allowing marketers to engage audiences that used to be limited to social media interactions.

Best Practices for Cookie Management

Cookie management is an important part of marketing in 2025. Here are some tips to help you gather data and put it to use while still respecting your customers’ privacy:

Prioritize Transparency and User Consent

All marketers are bound by privacy regulations. Some are region-specific, like GDPR, which is a regulation that applies to those in the European Union. Others, like the CCPA, affect marketers targeting U.S. audiences. The CCPA gives consumers in California enhanced protections when it comes to what marketers do with the information they collect.

“For cookie management, businesses need to ensure compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and evolving global privacy laws and use consent management platforms (CMPs) to handle opt-ins/outs,” warns Ivan Vislavskiy, co-founder and CEO of Comrade Digital Marketing Agency.

Invest in First-Party Data Infrastructure

First-party data strategies are crucial under current regulations. As Sasha Berson, co-founder and chief growth officer at Grow Law Firm, points out, GDPR fines for violations can reach in the tens of millions of dollars, and CCPA violations can cost a couple of thousand dollars per violation.

Optimize Performance Marketing Strategies

Pincu has spoken to performance marketers at length to get a feel for their pain points, and says that one thing that came up time and time again was that marketers felt underserved outside of search and social. As those channels became less efficient, marketers found they were having to use generalist tools for specialized tasks.

“These highly skilled marketers control budgets of tens of billions of dollars, and are critical revenue drivers for their businesses,” says Pincu. “However, much of their spend on the open web (approximately $25 billion) and on social platforms (approximately $30 billion) is on suboptimal tools, despite experiencing diminishing returns.”

To remedy this, marketers must expand to a multichannel approach while also using advanced tools. Incorporating technologies like a dedicated performance AI, based on years of hard data, can help marketers get a better return on their marketing spend, making up for the diminishing returns they’ve been getting on search and social.

Key Takeaways

First-party cookies can help you gather information on your own website visitors, while third-party cookies are designed to track users across the web. With cookie deprecation hampering marketers’ ability to gather data, it’s essential to embrace tools that build in artificial intelligence. Contextual advertising is another way to personalize consumer experiences without relying on third-party cookies.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What are second-party cookies?

Second-party cookies are a happy medium between first- and third-party data transfer. A second-party cookie is passed between trusted partners: For example, your business might strike up a partnership with a similar business and agree to share the first-party customer data you’ve collected.

“They’re passed between trusted partners — like a gym and a nutrition product brand — and allow companies to share audience information compliantly,” explains Barrier. “But, most small businesses don’t even think about them. Why? Because they just assume partnerships are for big brands. In reality, a healthy partnership can offer you targeted data without compromising privacy.”

Pixel tracking vs. cookies: What’s the difference?

If you advertise on Facebook, you’ve likely used pixels that you install on your website to collect data on the visitors you get from the social media site. Pixel tracking embeds a small piece of code on your website, sending information to the server. Cookies, on the other hand, are stored on an individual user’s device, following their activity everywhere a user goes.

“There’s the myth that pixel tracking is privacy-friendly,” Barrier says. “It isn’t. Pixels still collect behavioral data, and unless companies make it crystal-clear in their privacy policies, they’re at risk.”

What is personalized pricing?

Marketers aren’t just customizing ads in real time, they’re also using advanced tools to adjust pricing in real time to increase conversions. Data like a customer’s browsing history or location can be used to choose a price.