Enable First-Party Cookies with the Pixel

Have you enabled first-party cookies with your pixel?

You probably heard that Chrome started limiting third-party cookies on January 4th. Google’s goal is to eliminate all third-party cookies by the end of 2024. Considering 60% of internet users are on Chrome and Safari already took this step, third-party cookies are likely to be phased out this year.

Meta hasn’t been clear about how they use third-party cookies, but there is one step that you can take: Enable first-party cookies with the pixel.

Do the following:

  1. Within Events Manager, go to Data Sources
  2. Select your pixel and go to the Settings tab
  3. Scroll down to Cookie Usage
  4. Turn on first-party cookies if you haven’t already
Meta Pixel First-Party Cookies

Meta is pretty cryptic about what exactly this does (the benefits of first-party cookies with the pixel vs. third-party cookies and vice versa), but first-party cookies aren’t part of this Chrome update.

When possible, you’ll want to leverage first-party data going forward. That includes passing events using the Conversions API and turning on first-party cookies with your pixel. While this won’t necessarily solve all data loss resulting from the elimination of third-party cookies (we still aren’t clear what this looks like), this puts you in a better position.

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