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We removed advertising cookies, here's what happened

• junon 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
    • c0l0 3y ago
      The one number that should be of interest to anyone who's not a professional "growth marketer" is missing, though, don't you agree? I skimmed the whole article, read your posting, and even though I know some of these words, I still have no idea if the decision was hurtful to the business, or if it did not move the needle at all, or if it even was a net positive, all things considered.
      • the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
        > I still have no idea if the decision was hurtful to the business, or if it did not move the needle at all, or if it even was a net positive, all things considered It's incredibly hard to tell. For us the goal of eliminating Cookies was important given the stance we have on privacy so everything went from there. The folks working in marketing for sure were not happy with the directive as it makes their job much harder. But the world is still spinning, even without cookies. That's enough to call this a success.
        • zilti 3y ago
          The same stance on privacy that somehow makes it okay for you to scan all your users' code for AI training without consent?
          • the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
            I'm assuming you are referring to our terms of service change. The short answer is: we are not. We posted an update to the blog post here that gives more context: https://blog.sentry.io/ai-privacy-and-terms-of-service-updates/ https://blog.sentry.io/ai-privacy-and-terms-of-service-updat...
          • dxdm 3y ago
            Could you elaborate on what they are doing?
            • zilti 3y ago
              Sentry scans all data sent to it to train their problem solving assistant, no matter if you use it or not, and there is no opt-out.
              • the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
                That is incorrect. We are not doing that.
        • bawolff 3y ago
          Well that's fair, i do feel a little let down by a lack of answer to "here's what happened" part of the headline, which largely went unanswered.
          • the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
            Marketing budget went into marketing things. Results were in line with expectations :P
        • 3y ago
      • ToucanLoucan 3y ago
        > I skimmed the whole article, read your posting, and even though I know some of these words, I still have no idea if the decision was hurtful to the business, or if it did not move the needle at all, or if it even was a net positive, all things considered. I mean, based on my interactions with marketing people, they often don't really know if much of what they've done has helped the business at all, and the majority of their work (apart from actually creating marketing copy and interacting with customers) seems to revolve around figuring out how to attribute booms in business to their previous campaigns while building plausible deniability for inevitable busts. Don't get me wrong, not ALL of it is completely incomprehensible: email and referrer links are pretty straightforwardly calculable in terms of their impact; but things like "brand awareness" campaigns are nigh impossible to actually gauge the impact of.
        • ameister14 3y ago
          I never understood why businesses accepted this. At least with digital marketing, it is possible to track pretty much everything and connect marketing campaigns with concrete results. It's actually not impossible to gauge the impact of a brand awareness campaign if you run the campaign properly using good principles of experiment design, especially if you associate it with keywords and track those or are using search ads.
    • njitram 3y ago
      This is probably whats going to happen everywhere, Google will be even more dominant in adtech with 3rd party cookie removal. Everyone moving to 1st party advertising (SERP, Youtube ads), display ads are race to the bottom without targeting..
  • elzbardico 3y ago
    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.
    • tgv 3y ago
      This morning, I opened a help page for a B2B product. There is a wiki with all API calls, but not a hint as to how to use them, and there are some pages for people who use it via their frontend. To get some bearings on the API, I opened the latter, and the first topic I opened said: "We at [...] understand that being able to accurately manage [...] while fielding is essential to a successful project." The entire text was two more sentences and a video. That's just taking the piss. Just say "watch the damn vid." if you really want to add text.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • troyvit 3y ago
    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.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• voytec 3y ago
  Funny that the site tries to load some garbage from googletagmanager.com
  • chupapimunyenyo 3y ago
    This is how much they care
  • cqqxo4zV46cp 3y ago
    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.
    • zelphirkalt 3y ago
      It is in the same league as advertising cookies. If I visit a website, I want to read or interact with that website, not with Google. Trying to shove Google into my face will meet the same reaction as trying to shove ads in my face. Getting blocked.
      • rrr_oh_man 3y ago
        > Trying to shove Google into my face will meet the same reaction as trying to shove ads in my face. Getting blocked. You will have a hard time browsing the web, including this site ;)
        • the_third_wave 3y ago
          Not at all, just use a content blocker in whitelist mode allowing 1st party content and you're done.
        • cwales95 3y ago
          Not really. I block all occurences of google tag manager and a lot of other ad related services and I have 0 issues.
        • 3y ago
• janwillemb 3y ago
  The title is quite clickbaity, especially since sibling comments say that the article doesn't tell what happened.
  • itsoktocry 3y ago
    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.
    • ogotai 3y ago
      I judge the headline as clickbait as well, and skipped reading it because of it. Sounds like I made the right decision based on other comments. It (probably) could've easily said, in say one to ten words, what actually happened, in the headline, so that I could decide whether I wanted to read into the details or whether it didn't interest me at all. With the headline being "something happened" and you'll have to read multiple paragraphs before you find out anything at all, I'm immediately put off. I feel like my time is being wasted. Entice me by describing an interesting outcome in the headline, that I want to read more about, or inform me, in the headline, that it's not an article for me. Attempting to artificially drive more traffic and eyeballs to an article, by withholding details in the headline of what it is about, is the definition of clickbait in my book.
      • shkkmo 3y ago
        If you skipped reading the article then don't comment on it.
        • ogotai 3y ago
          I wasn't commenting on the article, just the fact that its headline is clickbait.
    • janwillemb 3y ago
      I'm commenting on the title, not on the article (siblings did that).
• potatoproduct 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Great, so this’ll happen to all of em soon. Fuck people might have to talk to their users ;-)
    • potatoproduct 3y ago
      As a user you'll probably find you get more clickbait, more ads, more paywalls, less access to high quailty content, etc as publishers scramble to survive. (Because the value of their ad inventory drops.) And as marketing is less efficient, higher budgets are required to drive the same results. We can potentially expect to see these costs gradually passed on to the consumers and watch more businesses fail.
      • cpach 3y ago
        Or see subscription-only publishers thrive?
        • phailhaus 3y ago
          And slowly make the internet increasingly inaccessible without opening up your wallet. Hooray!
          • coldpie 3y ago
            Given what ads have done to give us the current state of the web, I'm willing to give it a shot.
            • 3y ago
• block_dagger 3y ago
  This article is too long and packed with marketing crap to wade through.
  • madeofpalk 3y ago
    You're surprised an article about marketing is full of marketing stuff?
    • mrweasel 3y ago
      What many, including myself, wanted to hear is: See, tracking cookies does nothing. Instead what we got is an article that explains that companies do in fact not need cookies, they are plenty capable of tracking our reactions to advertising without them. Then there are paragraphs like this one: > We decided to rely on ad engagement retargeting (rather than traditional retargeting) on most of our ad channels which isn’t the same, but still gives us a semblance of a funnel. We tailored our ads that are focused on middle of funnel (MOF) and bottom of funnel (BOF) to this engaged audience. Which for people like me is a big "WAT?" What does that even mean, what are consequences, why didn't they do this earlier? I am aware of "retargeting", which is really what I want companies to stop doing, I don't care if they do it without cookies. But yes, this isn't for the technical or privacy focused crowd. This is for marketing people, about how they can adjust their workflows when Chrome starts blocking 3rd party cookies.
      • braiamp 3y ago
        > Which for people like me is a big "WAT?" What does that even mean, what are consequences, why didn't they do this earlier? Traditional retargeting is done discriminatory. You visited a site, got enrolled in a list, etc. and they start targeting that. Ad engagement retargeting on the other hand waits until you "engage" with the ad, meaning that you have explicitly showed interest. Is another explicit vs implicit.
    • stubish 3y ago
      I'm waiting for the article about online marketing no longer being possible. And everything (except the marketing department) becomes better because search directs you to what you want to find, rather than what the highest marketing budget wants you to find.
• weakwire 3y ago
  I came to the comments for the summary only to find out there is no summary...
• scotty79 3y ago
  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.
  • the_mitsuhiko 3y ago
    The "random" ads you are getting are quite likely already targeted ads.
    • magicalhippo 3y ago
      That's the crux of the issue: 99% of companies wanting to sell me something doesn't have a product I want. Of the remainder, I already am a customer in 99% of the cases.
  • nirimda 3y ago
    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.
  • motoxpro 3y ago
    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.
• kosolam 3y ago
  If anyone started reading and also got confused like me. Chrome change will affect third party cookies, not all cookies.
  • brodo 3y ago
    Thanks, I was scared there for a little bit...
  • rob74 3y ago
    But even if you only use your own cookies, you will still have to show one of those annoying cookie banners first...
    • isodev 3y ago
      Only if you use the cookies to track users. Cookies like authentication and things needed by the website to work do not require the banner. And so I think Sentry did the right thing, one can go to sentry.io and browse without having this fugly banner to dismiss every time.
      • recursive 3y ago
        Authentication is the most reliable form of user tracking.
    • master-lincoln 3y ago
      Sometimes I think the ad industry made up the misleading term cookie-banner. At least GDPR does not limit the technology used for collecting personal information. You still need to ask for consent if you track users with some other technology. Using cookies does not require consent under GDPR, collecting and sharing PII does though (if not necessary for the service to function)
      • M2Ys4U 3y ago
        It's the ePrivacy Directive (and not the GDPR) that prohibits storing any data on the user's machines unless they are a) strictly necessary to provide the service, or b) the user consents.
• b2bsaas00 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
    • M2Ys4U 3y ago
      >GDPR is about consent Consent is one of six different legal bases for processing personal data. Consent is important, yes, but it's not the be all and end all. >It should even be fine as a cookie, although there have been talks about storing on a users device without consent That will require consent, because the use of cookies is regulated not by the GDPR but by a different law (the ePrivacy Directive). Under the ePrivacy Directive all cookies[0] that aren't strictly necessary to provide the service require consent. [0] In fact it's even broader than cookies as the law covers storing any information on the user's device, so it includes things like the local storage API and indexed DB.
  • stalfosknight 3y ago
    Can we just not have all that tracking bullshit in URLs please?
  • wellpast 3y ago
    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.
• notjes 3y ago
  Reading headlines like this my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
• vcg3rd 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
• brown_martin 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing. Appreciate you taking the time to share your experience and results.
  • dylan604 3y ago
    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.
    • itsoktocry 3y ago
      >You seem to be the only one that speaks the language to know. Here's one conclusion I grabbed, randomly: "we saw around a 30% increase in our cost per click (CPCs) in Google search." The average HN user thinks marketers (and MBAs) are stupid, and assumes they can master the industry if only they put it a few days effort. Maybe you aren't the intended audience?
    • ezfe 3y ago
      The conclusion section clearly outlines it: - Issues you're already having will get worse in 2024 - Cookieless performance marketing is achievable - You will need all your stakeholders aligned - You will need to reimagine how you do things
• jefftk 3y ago
  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 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 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.
  • soyyo 3y ago
    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.
    • jefftk 3y ago
      Cookie banners predate the GDPR, and were initially a response to the ePrivacy Directive of 2002: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Directive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Directive While the GDPR has added additional restrictions, the basic framework is still in force: you can't store information client-side (cookies, localStorage etc) unless (a) it is "strictly necessary" to fulfill a user request or (b) you get user consent. All the cookies above look to me like they don't meet that bar; the site seems to still fulfill my requests with cookies disabled. (Not a lawyer.)
    • Waterluvian 3y ago
      Indeed. Cookies are incredibly useful for things the user really does want, like staying logged in across sessions/tabs.
      • 3y ago
• btbuildem 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Sentry produces nothing of value? You don't value an open source error tracking and performance monitoring platform? https://github.com/getsentry/sentry https://github.com/getsentry/sentry
  • el_benhameen 3y ago
    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.
• mlhpdx 3y ago
  Huge “Thank you!” to Matt and Sentry for writing and sharing this article. Should our paths ever cross, the drinks are on me.
• charlieyu1 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Sentry is not open source, it's BuSL: https://blog.sentry.io/relicensing-sentry/ https://blog.sentry.io/relicensing-sentry/
    • flexagoon 3y ago
      No, it's actually FSL https://blog.sentry.io/introducing-the-functional-source-license-freedom-without-free-riding/ https://blog.sentry.io/introducing-the-functional-source-lic...
• troupe 3y ago
  > 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.
  • dns_snek 3y ago
    I also find this hard to believe. You'd think Google and other scamvertisers would be screaming in pain right now with profits plummeting.
  • andrenotgiant 3y ago
    Yeah I would actually believe that for sentry.io visitors, but for the internet at large, that seems high.
  • yborg 3y ago
    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.
    • tensor 3y ago
      I'm one of those extremely against ads people who use an adblocker all the time, or pay for services that allow me to in order to remove ads. That said, I still click on accept for those cookie dialogs. I think it's entirely fair that someone track me on their own web property, or within their own application. Cross-site tracking is not wonderful, unless it's between a collection of related products from the same product suite. But overall I think it's a huge misstatement to say that people who are against ads are also rabid anti-track-anything people. Within product tracking is both useful and important for helping companies improve their products. And often it's crucial for security, to detect attacks and the like.
  • m3047 3y ago
    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.
• math_dandy 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    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.
• Rapzid 3y ago
  That's a long winded article.
• zaroth 3y ago
  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.
  • Rapzid 3y ago
    Color me skeptical cookies are going anywhere this year.
  • cpeterso 3y ago
    > 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-cooking-killing-1851159736 https://gizmodo.com/google-chrome-users-worth-less-money-coo... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38959791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38959791
• Dwedit 3y ago
  You're just fighting over everyone else who doesn't adblock at that point.
• clouddrover 3y ago
  > 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!
• varenc 3y ago
  Anyone know more about these 'offline passbacks'? > for certain tracking technology like hashed offline passbacks
  • datadrivenangel 3y ago
    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.
    • cobertos 3y ago
      Interesting, so like sort of like an affiliate program, but in like a bulk non-realtime way. Is there any way from preventing under/over reporting of how many referrals were sent? Or is that just implicit in having the hashed identifier
      • datadrivenangel 3y ago
        Without hashes, there's some trust, statistics, and customer support involved. If the affiliate sender sees a lot of referral traffic from their end, and you don't report many visitors or conversions, often the affiliate providers will try and troubleshoot that to make sure you're seeing results that are in line with their other partners.
• araes 3y ago
  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-from-cookies-in-chrome-to-2024/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/27/google-delays-move-away-fr...
  • firejake308 3y ago
    I guess they're trying to push their new Topics API instead?
  • kccqzy 3y ago
    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.