We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened

[jefftk]

While they removed cookie banners and say they no longer include dependencies that set cookies, browsing around the site for a bit I still see several cookies set. For example, visiting https://changelog.getsentry.com I get first-party cookies "_GRECAPTCHA", "ph_phc_UlHlA3tIQlE89WRH9NSy0MzlOg1XYiUXnXiYjKBJ4OT_posthog", and "_launchnotes_session", plus third-party cookie "_GRECAPTCHA" on recaptcha.net.

Similarly, visiting https://try.sentry-demo.com I got cookies "sentrysid", "sc", and "sudo".

I also got a player.vimeo.com cookie at some point, but wasn't able to reproduce.

If you're running a complex modern site and decide to do away with cookie banners, you generally need to pair this with browser automation that crawls your site and verifies that you (and your dependencies) are in fact not setting any cookies.

[the_mitsuhiko]

You're right that fighting these cookies is not trivial and automation helps a lot. The remaining cookies are functional ones which are needed to use the sandbox for instance. That the changelog sets cookies is a known issue that will be resolved once the changelog is moved off launchnotes.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

> If you're running a complex modern site and decide to do away with cookie banners, you generally need to pair this with browser automation that crawls your site and verifies that you (and your dependencies) are in fact not setting any cookies.

Correction: any cookies which are not technically required for the basic operation of the site (such as a shopping cart ID).

[soyyo]

I believe that under GDPR cookies that are used only for technical purposes and not related to personal information are exempt from any consent and don't need to be informed with the infamous cookie banner.

Is not about cookies, is about their content and purpose.

[mark_story]

The sentrysid, sc, and sudo cookies are all login state cookies btw.

[zaroth]

So Google AdWords performance absolutely tanks with the sunsetting of 3rd-party cookies…

It looks like this mostly happens because they lose the conversion signaling which is the most important input to their bidding model, making them pay for 4x as many impressions which still only concert to 1/10th the sales.

Is this the experience that all Google AdWords customers will be waking up to later in 2024? It sounds like Sentry is being pro-active and getting ahead of the curve, and not just cutting their advertising performance for purely benevolent anti-tracking reasons.

When this happened to FB they lost tens of billions of dollars. Will the impact to Google be even greater? If there’s anything that could truly disrupt Google, destroying AdWords ROI has got to be their #1 existential risk.

It’s not like their search experience is even that decent anymore. It would make me quite happy to see Google peak as a company due to internet privacy initiatives winning out over invasive corporate panopticons.

[cpeterso]

> Chrome Users Now Worth 30% Less Money Thanks to Google's Cookie Killing, Ad Firm Says

https://gizmodo.com/google-chrome-users-worth-less-money-coo...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38959791

[Rapzid]

Color me skeptical cookies are going anywhere this year.

[troupe]

> 42.7% of internet users worldwide use ad blockers.

Given how many people I know that still type google into the google search bar, I find this number to be extraordinarily high.

[yborg]

This was the money shot here. If that many people are trying to get away from what you do, maybe you shouldn't be doing it.

[cantSpellSober]

I couldn't find a source for this figure. It links to https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users which is more specific

> 42.7% of internet users worldwide (16-64 years old) use ad blocking tools at least once a month

> 27% of American internet users block ads

...I still couldn't find the source for that. I believe it's a "Digital Trends Report" by Hootsuite but couldn't find it.

[m3047]

It's trackers. I don't block ads, I block trackers. I block large swathes of rentable name / address space (being vague, don't know you, protecting my TTPs) that trackers like to rent by default; anything that lives in there that I decide I want I whitelist. So my actions affect those who utilize the network(s) I administer.

[andrenotgiant]

Yeah I would actually believe that for sentry.io visitors, but for the internet at large, that seems high.

[dns_snek]

I also find this hard to believe. You'd think Google and other scamvertisers would be screaming in pain right now with profits plummeting.

[bombcar]

42.7% of statistics are made up on the spot.

[kosolam]

If anyone started reading and also got confused like me. Chrome change will affect third party cookies, not all cookies.

[brodo]

Thanks, I was scared there for a little bit...

[rob74]

But even if you only use your own cookies, you will still have to show one of those annoying cookie banners first...

[voytec]

Funny that the site tries to load some garbage from googletagmanager.com

[the_mitsuhiko]

We are also in the process of eliminating that.

[cqqxo4zV46cp]

I’ve seen countless occurrences of Google Tag Manager being routinely used for all kinds of things that aren’t “advertising cookies”. There really is no need for the snark.

[quickthrower2]

GTM. End running ops/dev teams since … well whenever it first came out.

[Rapzid]

Ah, GTM.

I think people might be shocked that access to this RCE backdoor is often given to non-technical roles and even outsourced marketing resources..With no controls in place at all.

Security nightmare.

[chupapimunyenyo]

This is how much they care

[weakwire]

I came to the comments for the summary only to find out there is no summary...

[janwillemb]

The title is quite clickbaity, especially since sibling comments say that the article doesn't tell what happened.

[itsoktocry]

So you didn't even read an article you describe as "clickbaity"?

Maybe try reading it, there's a lot of "what happened" in there.

[block_dagger]

This article is too long and packed with marketing crap to wade through.

[madeofpalk]

You're surprised an article about marketing is full of marketing stuff?

[troyvit]

It's literally about marketing, and probably the most complex marketing issue facing web sites in 2024. It's gonna be long.

[math_dandy]

Article mentions Sentry's shift from tracking to "brand and awareness marketing". Thanks to their recently acquired Syntax Podcast (recommended), I am now quite aware of their brand. Seems like a positive, creative approach to marketing. I wonder if there is a noticeable "Syntax effect" in their business metrics.

[zeeg]

Hard to tell as we always advertised with Syntax. I would say the investments are related, but not connected (and made independently). We love Syntax, believe in brand advertising, and wanted to push more thre. We also hate the CX of cookie banners, I personally dislike wasteful tracking, and wanted to push the boundaries a bit on that front.

[araes]

The most interesting part of this article personally was "Google's getting rid of cookies". Wait, what? How is this the first time I've heard of this?

Apparently the move is already delayed until Q2 2024 (lots of pushback at the office) [1] However, it's still difficult to believe. Must be an utter nightmare for people who built their entire business stack on cookies.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/27/google-delays-move-away-fr...

[kccqzy]

Well did you know that Firefox and Safari already got rid of third party cookies? And Google only delayed it due to various government intervention.

[firejake308]

I guess they're trying to push their new Topics API instead?

[notjes]

Reading headlines like this my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.

[vcg3rd]

I'm not a developer and have no use case for your service but thanks for the forward thinking, experimenting, transparency, and efforts to improve one of the things that enshi*ified the Web.

[JKCalhoun]

And I'm not a marketer so maybe I am mistaken, but from what I read it sounded like they're fetching about for different ways to enshitify the web.

[potatoproduct]

TLDR;

Performance tanked. Targeting and optimisation dwindled, measurement became directional last click. They still switched to solutions that leverage IP Addresses.

As they burned through their marketing budget, they focused on bogus metrics like dwelltimes and patted eachother on the back.

Fun times ahead.

[quickthrower2]

Great, so this’ll happen to all of em soon. Fuck people might have to talk to their users ;-)

[rob74]

You probably mean marketing performance? Because my first thought was "how on earth can removing ads and tracking be bad for site performance?!"

[varenc]

Anyone know more about these 'offline passbacks'?

> for certain tracking technology like hashed offline passbacks

[datadrivenangel]

You refer potential customers and send us a list, we tell you what they bought and how much we owe you.

The hashed offline part probably refers to hashed email or other PII, so that we can exchange data without actually exchanging data.

[clouddrover]

> We market to developers who notoriously do not like being marketed to (we should know; we are a developer-led company and Sentry users ourselves), so the idea of removing ad cookies instantly intrigued us.

Ooh, they're going after that anti-marketer market. That's a huge market! Look at our research!

[Dwedit]

You're just fighting over everyone else who doesn't adblock at that point.

[charlieyu1]

I don't know why sentry ads is popping up so often on Reddit. And they even turn off commenting. Very unusual for an open source developer tool.

[yencabulator]

Sentry is not open source, it's BuSL: https://blog.sentry.io/relicensing-sentry/

[mlhpdx]

Huge “Thank you!” to Matt and Sentry for writing and sharing this article. Should our paths ever cross, the drinks are on me.

[brown_martin]

Thanks for sharing. Appreciate you taking the time to share your experience and results.

[dylan604]

Well fellow marketing person, what was the experience? You seem to be the only one that speaks the language to know. The rest of us are left wondering what the point of this self back patting exercise actually was.

[Rapzid]

That's a long winded article.

[b2bsaas00]

I have a campaign with a UTM link, once the user lands on our page we save this UTM as cookie and then we persist on our db at sign up.

Is this complaint with GDPR and will it still possible in the future?

[treffer]

IANAL

GDPR is about consent, not cookies, storage or anything. If you track a user then you need consents. Nothing about GDPR is tied to cookies. They are just one way to generate and keep PII (a tracking ID).

Now if the UTM only identifies the source (user coming from X, FB, ...) and does not identify or reveal the user then you are probably fine. It should even be fine as a cookie, although there have been talks about storing on a users device without consent. Not sure about the current exact legal status, so you might want to set it to never persist the browser close.

It might get a bit more complicated at sign up. You probably would want to disclose that you track and keep this information. But at this point GDPR is active for sure as you have a somehow identifiable user.

[wellpast]

Presumably that's a first-party cookie you're persisting not a cross-site third-party cookie, so wholly different standards apply for your case.

[stalfosknight]

Can we just not have all that tracking bullshit in URLs please?

[junon]

I kept waiting for their findings but halfway through it's just a bunch of self-gratifying talk and deflecting talking about why they think it's important - I read for two solid minutes without them getting to any hard numbers or findings.

[zztop44]

It does have findings, it’s just a long article. Maybe longer than it needs to be. Looks like their SERP ads CPC increased by 30% and conversions decreased, display ad conversions plummeted (partially offset by cheaper CPMs) and YouTube ads switched to optimize for watch time instead of conversions seemed to perform better and lead to cheaper conversions.

[troyvit]

Two minutes? That's less than half a cigarette.

It took awhile but I finished the article. I don't see much self-gratification in phrases like:

> we saw around a 30% increase in our cost per click (CPCs) in Google search.

Or this:

> This took a TON of back and forth, basically building logic that an out-of-the-box attribution solution already has in SQL, but we finally got to a place where we could salvage around 50% of attribution data.

The self congratulating I saw was

* they decided to try this before it was foisted on them by externalities.

* they worked their asses off to make it work.

* they have a competent BI team.

I don't understand why they also eliminated most first party cookies though. I respect that level of respect for user privacy but it goes beyond my personal expectation for privacy.

[elzbardico]

Marketing speak is incredibly annoying and low content.

That’s why chat GPT is to produce marketing copy that is as good or better than the best ad people can do.

[scotty79]

Can I voluntarily register somewhere and profile myself for the purposes of ad targeting? I'd really hate to just get completely random ads everywhere.

[nirimda]

It's not that bad. For a long time ads could only be targeted based on correlations rather than personal information. Ads weren't completely random. You would read a travel magazine targeted at men and there would be advertisements in there about flights to some location or recreational activities or male-coded razor blades, whereas a travel magazine targeted at women would have advertisements in it about flights to the same location, different recreational activities and female-coded razor blades. You would take a train to work and there would be advertisements about local restaurants and banks offering home loans in your area. You would exist and you'd get advertisements about an American soft drink.

In the early days of the internet, few enough companies wanted to advertise on the internet - advertisers viewed it already as targeted at a certain segment of society - so advertisements were generally very low value i.e. crap. Tracking technology let advertisers know that they could actually find the people didn't realise were using the internet. But nowadays we all know everyone is on the internet, and we tend to use the same sites regularly, so you could get adequately targeted ads (as a set of eyeballs - not necessarily as an advertiser) just by using the internet.

[guappa]

They are just very bad at targeting them.

I'm a software developer so of course 90% of the ads I see on fb are for developer courses and no-code solutions to develop software…

On youtube there's often the "meet east european single women" above the list of suggested videos.

[the_mitsuhiko]

The "random" ads you are getting are quite likely already targeted ads.

[motoxpro]

Are people downvoting because they think that no targeting means no ads? It just means worse ads and MORE ads because the ones that are there are less valuable. Ironic.

[phailhaus]

Yes, but you don't have to do anything. Google is pushing a new advertising paradigm [1] wherein the tracking is done client-side and then sent (at your discretion) to websites for ad-serving.

[1] https://privacysandbox.com/

[ParetoOptimal]

Just block all ads?

[btbuildem]

EDIT: classic, didn't dig into the context, assumed Sentry was some ad ecosystem middleman -- apologies for the below (will leave as it was because there are child comments). These guys have a real product doing real things.

----

It's fascinating to me how this org (and so many others) are hard at work, day in and day out, basically shovelling garbage into peoples' faces. They produce absolutely nothing of value (other than, arguably, the parasitic relationship which allows Free Content), but so much money flows through them.

I wonder what effect the exclusion of third party cookies will have on the dark patterns that are so prevalent -- but I doubt it will be much. We may have "free" access to so much information online, but we pay a terrible place as the quality of discourse has devolved into antagonistic feces-flinging in most of the big walled gardens, and majority of the open forums. It seems only the domain-specific, niche places still maintain a quality noise-to-signal ratio.

[gaadd33]

Sentry produces nothing of value? You don't value an open source error tracking and performance monitoring platform? https://github.com/getsentry/sentry

[el_benhameen]

I’m with you in theory, but Sentry is for error ingestion, not for tracking users. We find it quite useful for discovering client-side errors we’d otherwise be blind to.