Targeting cookies are the ones that decide what advertising a person sees, on your site and on other people's. The category is straightforward in principle and surprising in practice, because the things that land in it are frequently not the things anyone thinks of as advertising. The most common surprise on a small company site is the embedded video.
What sits in the category
Advertising platform pixels, retargeting tags, conversion trackers, social platform pixels, and any embed that loads from an advertising company's domain in its default configuration. The last group is what catches people. A video player embedded from a large platform will, unless switched to its privacy-preserving mode, set identifiers used for advertising, which makes a page carrying a product demo an advertising surface whether or not you sell advertising.
What a refusal actually stops
If the gating is correct, the tag never loads, so no identifier is written and no request carrying one is made. That means no retargeting audience membership, no view-through attribution and, in most platforms, no conversion recorded for that visitor. It is worth being plain about this internally before the change ships, because the numbers move and somebody will ask why.
The embed problem and its cheap fix
Almost every major video and map embed has a privacy-preserving variant that is a different URL or a single parameter. Switching to it usually removes the embed from the targeting category entirely, which removes a category line from your banner and a vendor from your disclosure. It is the highest-value fix per minute spent in this whole area and it is routinely missed because the embed was added by someone writing a page rather than someone managing tags.
Keeping the category honest between campaigns
Targeting is the category that changes most, because marketing adds pixels for campaigns and rarely removes them afterwards. A quarterly comparison of the live tag list against the category description catches the pixel from a campaign that ended, which is both a disclosure problem and a page weight problem. Removing a dead pixel is the rare fix that improves compliance, performance and the honesty of the notice at once.
Questions people ask about targeting cookies
Is targeting the same as advertising?
Most tools use the two words for the same category. Pick one name and use it consistently across the banner, the notice and the record, because two names for one thing makes the record harder to read later.
Do social share buttons need consent?
The plain link version does not. The script version that loads from the platform usually does, because it sets identifiers on load.
What about an embedded map?
Same question as a video. Check what it sets on load; the major providers offer configurations that set far less.
Does refusing targeting break the site?
No. It may break a measurement dashboard, which is a different thing and worth saying clearly when the question comes up.
Can I keep conversion tracking without targeting cookies?
Partly, through modelled conversions and server side measurement, both of which still depend on data from the visitor and neither of which is a route around consent.
Who usually owns this category internally?
Marketing adds to it and whoever owns the banner is accountable for it. That split is exactly why it drifts, and why a scheduled review beats a one-off audit.