62% of consumers find retargeting ads creepy and scary (Business Review, 2022). You know the experience: browse a pair of shoes once, and that shoe follows you across every website for weeks. This isn’t a glitch. It’s third-party cookie tracking working exactly as designed—and it’s the reason cookies became a dirty word.

But here’s what most people don’t realize: the shoe stalking you across the internet has nothing to do with the cookie your WordPress store uses to remember a shopping cart. These are fundamentally different technologies. When your customers click “reject all cookies,” they’re fighting back against ad network surveillance—and accidentally blocking your analytics in the crossfire.

The Moment Cookies Became Creepy#

Imagine you’re in a shoe store. You pick up a sneaker, look at it, put it back. Normal shopping behavior. Now imagine the salesperson follows you out the door, down the street, into the coffee shop, into your office, and keeps asking: “Are you SURE you don’t want those shoes?”

That’s retargeting. And 50% of US adults say ads promoting the same products over and over are the most off-putting advertising experience (LoopMe survey via eMarketer, 2021).

The technology behind this stalking is the third-party cookie. When you visit a website with embedded ads—and most websites have them—the ad network (not the website) places a cookie in your browser. Visit any other site using that same ad network, and they recognize you instantly. Your browsing history follows you everywhere.

This isn’t hypothetical consumer frustration. According to Gartner’s 2024 consumer survey, 47% of baby boomers feel negatively toward brands after receiving retargeted ads, compared to 27% of Gen Z. The older your customer base, the more likely retargeting is actively damaging your brand perception.

You may be interested in: Third-Party Cookie Update 2026: What Actually Died and Why It Still Matters

Why It Feels Like Your Phone Is Listening#

Here’s a statistic that explains the paranoia: 81% of consumers say that after discussing a product offline, they received an ad for it online (Gartner, 2024). This fuels the conspiracy theory that phones are constantly listening to conversations.

The reality is both more mundane and more unsettling. Ad networks don’t need to listen because they’ve built such comprehensive behavioral profiles that they can predict what you want before you consciously decide. Your browsing patterns, purchase history, location data, and social connections create eerily accurate predictions.

But the perception matters more than the technical explanation. Whether or not phones are literally listening, consumers feel surveilled. And that feeling drives blanket cookie rejection.

Third-Party vs. First-Party: The Distinction That Matters#

Third-party cookies are placed by domains other than the website you’re visiting. They’re the mechanism that allows ad networks to track you across the entire internet. When you see that shoe ad on a news site, a recipe blog, and your email inbox, third-party cookies made that possible.

First-party cookies are placed by the website you’re actually on. Your WordPress store’s analytics cookie can only see what happens on your site. It remembers that a visitor looked at three products and added one to cart—but the moment they leave, that cookie has no idea where they went. It cannot follow them.

This distinction is critical but almost never explained to consumers.

When your cookie consent banner pops up and a visitor clicks “reject all,” they’re thinking about the shoe stalker. They’re not thinking about their shopping cart suddenly forgetting what’s in it, or your analytics losing the ability to recognize returning customers.

You may be interested in: Stop Apologizing for Cookies: Why Your First-Party Data Isn’t the Problem

The Numbers Behind Retargeting’s Effectiveness—and Backlash#

Retargeted ads generate 10x better click-through rates than standard display ads (DemandSage, 2025). That’s why advertisers love them. A user who already looked at your product is dramatically more likely to buy than a random impression.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: 35% of consumers find retargeted ads creepy, even as they click on them. The effectiveness comes at a brand perception cost that’s difficult to measure but very real.

And the backlash compounds. 64% of consumers stated that ads based on location data feel creepy (Statista/MarketingCharts, 2023). As targeting gets more precise, consumer discomfort increases proportionally. The ad tech industry optimized for clicks without considering the long-term cost to trust.

What Big Advertisers Broke (And Why You’re Paying For It)#

The retargeting arms race was driven by large advertisers and ad networks maximizing short-term conversion metrics. Aggressive frequency caps (or no caps at all), cross-device stalking, and increasingly invasive data collection created the creepy experience that 62% of consumers now reject.

But cookie rejection isn’t precise. Privacy tools, browser settings, and consent popups treat all cookies the same. Your small store’s first-party analytics gets blocked alongside the ad network surveillance because consumers don’t have the technical knowledge—or the patience—to distinguish between them.

The result: you’re losing 30-40% of your tracking data because big advertisers made cookies a four-letter word.

What This Means for Your WordPress Store#

When customers reject cookies on your site, they’re not rejecting you. They’re rejecting the retargeting experience they’ve had everywhere else. Your challenge is to break through that blanket rejection by clearly distinguishing your first-party tracking from the cross-site surveillance they’re fighting against.

Some practical implications:

Your consent rates can improve with transparency. Consider language in your cookie banner that explicitly states your cookies don’t follow visitors to other sites. “We use cookies to remember your cart and understand how visitors use our site. We don’t share this data with ad networks or track you elsewhere.”

Server-side tracking bypasses the browser entirely. First-party data collected on your server—like purchase events, form submissions, and page views—doesn’t trigger the same consent friction because it never touches browser-based cookies. Transmute Engine™ captures this data directly from your WordPress installation and routes it to GA4, Facebook CAPI, and Google Ads without relying on browser cooperation.

First-party data is the ethical high ground. When you collect data about what happens on your own site with your own customers, you’re not participating in the cross-site surveillance economy. You’re just running a business that needs to understand its customers.

Key Takeaways#

• 62% of consumers find retargeting creepy—the ads that follow you across websites are powered by third-party cookies from ad networks, not the website you visited
• 47% of baby boomers feel negatively toward brands after receiving retargeted ads, making aggressive retargeting a brand risk
• First-party cookies only work on your domain—they cannot follow users to other sites, making them fundamentally different from surveillance tracking
• Blanket cookie rejection hurts small stores because consumers don’t distinguish between your analytics and ad network surveillance
• Server-side tracking offers an alternative—collecting first-party data on your server bypasses browser-based blocking entirely

Ready to collect first-party data without the cookie drama? See how Transmute Engine routes WordPress events server-side—no cross-site tracking, no creepy following, just the data you need to run your business.