Cookies start disappearing, and so does your profile site

Budgets get written in the first two weeks of January, which is when owners ask us what the reporting is going to look like this year. The answer starts with two notices that landed within a few weeks of each other. One is from Chrome, about cookies. One is from Google, about the small website attached to your business listing.

Neither reads as urgent. One of them has a deadline eight weeks out.

Chrome started switching cookies off this week

On 4 January Chrome turned on a feature it calls Tracking Protection for one percent of its users. Those people now browse with third-party cookies blocked by default. Google has said it intends to turn them off for everyone in the second half of this year.

One percent is a rounding error in your January report. The date is what matters, because this is the first time a plan Chrome announced four years ago has touched live traffic instead of a slide.

A third-party cookie is one set by a domain other than the one in the address bar. It is how an ad platform recognizes the same browser on your site and on a site you have nothing to do with. Take it away and a few things get thinner:

• Remarketing audiences. The list of people who read your implant page and can then be followed around the web shrinks. For a single-location business those lists were already small.
• View-through and cross-site attribution. The path that credits a Meta ad somebody saw on Monday for a call that came in on Thursday gets harder to reconstruct.
• Reported conversions, not real ones. Platforms fill the gaps with modelled numbers. Your dashboard drifts while the phone rings the same amount, and the temptation is to change something that was working.
• Some third-party widgets. Chat tools and call tracking scripts that stitch a visit together with their own cookie may see less than they used to. Ask the vendor what they are doing about it rather than assuming somebody has it handled.

What does not change is most of what actually feeds a local business. Analytics measuring one visit on your own domain uses a first-party cookie. Calls, form submissions, booked appointments and kept appointments live in your phone system and your CRM. The map pack, your listing and your reviews were never built on this plumbing at all.

If your reports have felt approximate since iPhones started asking people whether apps may track them, that is because they have been. This is the same road, further along.

The other date: profile websites go dark on 1 March

The second notice is the one with teeth. Google is shutting down Google Business Profile websites on 1 March.

Those are the free single-page sites Google generated out of the listing, usually sitting on a business.site address. They were never much of a website, and for plenty of businesses they have been the only one. After 1 March anyone who visits is sent to the Business Profile instead, and Google has said that redirect ends in June. After that the address is a dead link.

Three groups should check this week:

1. Businesses that never built a site. The listing is the business, the free page is the website, and the address is printed on a van or a card.
2. Second and third locations. The main office has a real site. Somebody set up the second listing years ago and pointed the website field at the free page.
3. Anyone who is not sure. Open your listing, look at the website field, and see whether the address contains business.site. It takes a minute.

If it does, you have eight weeks to point that field somewhere real. We will write up the options properly next month, because choosing the replacement page matters more than the deadline does. This week the job is only knowing whether you are affected.

What we are building this year’s measurement on

The cookie change does not need a panic. It needs the same thing we have been moving accounts toward for three years: your own data, collected on your own property, tied to work that actually happened.

1. Booked work is the source of truth. Not sessions, not clicks, not raw form counts. A confirmed appointment that the person kept.
2. Enhanced conversions for leads. When somebody submits a form, the hashed email or phone goes back to Google Ads with the conversion. It is first-party data, it survives cookie loss, and it is an afternoon of setup.
3. Click identifiers on the contact record. Capture the identifier Google and Meta append to your landing page URL, store it with the lead, and send the conversion back when the job is booked. In GoHighLevel that is a hidden form field plus a workflow on the pipeline stage.
4. Server-side reporting on the Meta side. The Conversions API sends the same events from your server rather than from the browser. It is not a loophole and it will not restore audience sizes. It stops events being dropped.
5. Calls measured where they are answered. Ring time, answer rate, voicemails at lunch. In the accounts we run that number moves revenue more than any attribution model does.

None of this is new advice. What is new is that the platforms can no longer paper over the gaps for you.

What to do this month

• Open your Business Profile and read the website field. If it contains business.site, put 1 March in the calendar and start choosing the page that replaces it.
• Ask whoever runs your ads which campaigns depend on remarketing audiences, and what the plan is when those lists shrink.
• Turn on enhanced conversions for leads in Google Ads if it is not running already.
• Get the click identifier saved on every lead in the CRM, so conversions can be sent back from booked work rather than from form fills.
• Write down three real numbers for December: calls answered, appointments booked, appointments kept. That is the baseline you compare against when the dashboards drift.
• Decide now that a falling conversion count in a platform report is a question, not an instruction.

The businesses that find this year easy are the ones whose reporting already stops at booked work. If you want help getting there, our Google Ads work starts by fixing what the account counts, and the listing side of the 1 March deadline is profile management, which is the cheapest hour you will spend in January.