New GA Cookie format

Disclaimer: this is not a technical post.

You may have noticed the posts various social platforms, there has been a change to the Google Analytics cookie format.

There are sound technical reasons for this change. There's a useful alignment of cookie formats across a range of Google platforms:

It's better for your data.

As mentioned at the top, this isn't a technical deep dive. If you want the details, it's been very well documented here (strong hat tip to David Vallejo). Action for you:

If you've done any tagging or data work that uses the first party cookie, you may need to revisit it. The format has changed, the data remains largely consistent.

IF you're using the old format in any way, check to see if the new cookie format breaks any tracking.

If you're using the data from the cookies in BigQuery data, you probably won't be affected. The data still ends up in BQ in the expected format - no further downstream issues expected.

Side track:

Don't grumble about this. You chose to integrate with a third party system. Of course, if you don't expect it to change then equally don't expect notice of change.

The top tier is prepared for change - be the top tier.

The server side FPID cookie format appears unchanged at the time of writing.