Death of Cookies, LinkedIn Ads Cost Increases & Google SGE Findings

Chrome begins the death of cookies, LinkedIn Ad prices are going up, and new research suggests Google’s AI prefers different things than Google’s search algorithm, on this week’s Marketing Minute.

Chrome Begins the Death of Cookies

The latest version of Chrome – the world’s most-used browser – includes new privacy features designed to effectively disable third-party cookies for 1% of their users. With Chrome’s massive user base, that means over 30 million consumers won’t be using third-party cookies. Advertisers should expect to see strange anomalies in their reporting and targeting, as 1% or more of their conversions fail to track correctly unless and until they update their tracking paradigm.

LinkedIn Ad Prices are Going Up

Financial Times is reporting that advertisers are seeing an increase in the costs of ads on LinkedIn. Interestingly, the report suggests that increase is due to advertisers moving dollars out of X and into LinkedIn, effectively driving up the buy-side of the real-time auctions on LinkedIn’s advertising platform. If those ad prices continue to rise, will LinkedIn be able to deliver a strong enough ROAS, or will those dollars flow into other markets or possibly even back into X after a cooling-off period?

Google’s AI Prefers Different Things than Google’s Search Algorithm

Recent research looking at the URLs suggested by Google’s Search Generative Experience – its AI-driven search responses – has found that the URLs suggested by AI don’t overlap very much with the URLs that appear in the first page of organic search results. As many as 19 out of 20 URLs suggested by the AI don’t naturally appear in organic results. Advertisers will need to pay close attention to the user-growth of AI-driven services like SGE and their returns from traditional SEO.