With the phase-out of third-party cookies and the rise of tracking protections, marketers have lost visibility into much of the customer journey. Safari and Firefox led the charge years ago, and now Chrome is catching up. Add in device-level privacy features and ad blockers, and even the best digital stacks are struggling to deliver the full picture.
Most analytics tools still look like they’re working. But behind the scenes, they’re missing critical segments, especially among users on iOS, Safari, or privacy-first sessions. This isn’t a future concern; it’s happening now, and it’s impacting every enterprise trying to make data-driven decisions.
Google’s Tag Gateway (formerly First-Party Mode) lets you serve Google tracking scripts from your own domain, which is a helpful step forward in privacy and reliability. But it’s limited to Google’s tools. Syntasa’s Composable CDP goes further: RT-tag captures behavioral data directly under your domain, processes it in your cloud, and activates it across any channel without third-party dependencies.
Modern Browsers are breaking legacy tools
Most traditional analytics and personalization platforms rely on third-party domains to collect data. But in today’s privacy-first environment, that approach no longer holds. Modern browsers are quick to flag or block those tags—even before a single event is collected. And that’s not all: ad blockers compound the issue. As of early 2025, approximately 32.5% of global internet users use ad blockers at least some of the time, including over 900 million people worldwide, with mobile users making up 54% of that total. In the U.S., usage hovers around 32.2%, and it’s even higher among technically savvy users—surging up to 52% of Americans in some surveys
Even platforms like GA4 or Adobe can miss entire sessions when requests come from untrusted sources. It doesn’t matter how well you’ve implemented them if the browser doesn’t trust the tag, tracking fails.
And when tracking fails, everything downstream suffers. Personalization doesn’t trigger. Journeys fragment. Optimization stalls. Marketing strategies end up running on partial data and stale assumptions driving up costs while eroding performance.
Cookie deprecation isn’t coming. It’s here. And for many brands, the impact is already being felt.
What First Party Mode Does Differently
First Party Mode isn’t a patch, it’s a fundamental shift. It moves your data collection and activation to your own subdomain, running entirely from your cloud environment. To the browser, it looks and behaves like your site, because it is.
There are no redirects, no third-party domains, and no signals of external ownership. It runs cleanly across Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and other modern browsers. And most importantly, it all happens post-consent. That means your data collection respects both browser restrictions and regulatory requirements by design.
See What You’ve Been Missing
When tracking fails, most systems don’t raise a flag. There’s no alert. No error. Sessions drop quietly, often before a single event is captured. The result: gaps in behavioral data that go unnoticed but compound over time.
First Party Mode changes that. By running directly under your domain, it restores visibility into previously blocked sessions—ethically, securely, and with full respect for user consent. These behavioral signals, once collected, are immediately available for activation inside your cloud using your existing models and logic. No third-party routing. No data handoffs.
Built for Control. Designed for Compliance.
The difference isn’t just in what First Party Mode captures—it’s where it runs.
Most CDPs are SaaS platforms, meaning your data is routed through vendor infrastructure and third-party domains. Modern browsers treat that as external—and block accordingly.
Syntasa’s Composable CDP is cloud-native and fully deployable within your environment—GCP, Azure, AWS, or a mix of cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Your data stays in your infrastructure, governed by your policies, and activated without duplication, delay, or risk of leakage.
In Practice
A leading UK electronics retailer realized that despite using major analytics platforms, key behavioral signals were missing—particularly across Safari and mobile. It wasn’t a misconfiguration. It was a modern browser doing exactly what it was designed to do: block third-party tags.
After adopting Syntasa’s First Party Mode, sessions that were once invisible—cart interest, promo engagement, delivery slot activity—became observable again. With real-time data flowing through their own cloud, teams could act faster and personalize more effectively. Implementation was direct. No workaround logic, no external tag orchestration—just clean, compliant data collection.
A Quite, but Strategic Shift
First Party Mode often flies under the radar. It’s not a standard RFP checkbox, and few teams are evaluating CDPs based on cloud architecture or browser enforcement.
But once they understand what they’re missing and what a first-party, cloud-native setup can unlock it quickly becomes a strategic priority.
This isn’t about circumventing privacy. It’s about aligning with it. First Party Mode works because it respects browser boundaries and honors user consent while still delivering the behavioral data today’s organizations need to move fast and operate with precision.
Reclaim Control
The days of reliable third-party tracking are over. But that doesn’t mean your visibility, activation, or control needs to suffer.
With Syntasa’s Composable CDP and First Party Mode, you collect first-party data from your own domain, process it securely in your own cloud, and activate it on your terms. No duplication. No vendor lock-in. No blind spots.
That’s modern data ownership by design.
Ready to see it in action? Let’s talk about what First Party Mode looks like in your environment.