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Essential Cookies Part I
Readers who remember Sesame Street will surely identify with the friendly little Cookie Monster. The Internet Cookie Monster has transformed as of late from a benign muppet eating cookies for a snack to an array of applications that target cookies as spyware or simply block their use. And this is no wonder with misguided legislation like we see in Australia.
In discussing cookies I wanted to find someone who was in a unique position to comment on the strengths and weaknesses of tracking from a trench perspective. So I contacted Jeff Doak, from Kowabunga. Unlike the traditional power-house networks Kowabunga doesn’t require a specific method of tracking from their merchants; they work with them to find the solution that fits best with their own unique situations.
Jeff- what do you do at Kowabunga?
Because I am personally involved in almost all new merchant setups and support over the past 5 years (about 2000 merchants), I not only had to advise users on solutions, I had to help implement them as well. This is for merchants with everything from a FrontPage form they made themselves to a completely inhouse database driven ordering system managed by a full IT team.
The goal in any tracking situation is fairly simple: track a user from a click event at an affiliate site to some sort of action at a merchant’s site. The problem? The internet was never designed to allow you to track a user easily across different sites; not even across different pages within the same site.
OK I think we can agree that is well established- so how can the problems be solved?
There are two ways to try to solve this problem. The first is to use the URL to store information about the user from page to page or site to site.
The other solution is a browser cookie, a small snippet of text stored on the user’s hard drive, readable only by the domain that wrote it to the browser.
I prefer Chocolate Chip Jeff, but I am assuming Internet Cookies come in different flavors? Can you elaborate?
Cookies come in two varieties. A “first party” cookie is a cookie written or read by x.com when you are actually browsing x.com; a third party cookie is a cookie written or read by y.com when at x.com. First party cookies can be easily read and written by x.com in a variety of ways, as the cookie was initially intended to help a given site store information from page to page within one site.
Third party cookies are essentially a trick, a workaround to the limitation that prevents one site from reading another’s cookies. They usually work by inserting an image tag on x.com that points to a script on y.com; that script can either read or write a cookie to y.com. As long as x.com is willing to put these image tags on their site, y.com can keep track of the user from page to page.
Internet Explorer 6 uses special rules that only allow third party cookies by default if y.com has the proper information ready when trying to write the cookie - information that promises the cookie will not hold personally identifiable information.
Despite this safeguard, some users choose to disable third party cookies, either manually or via ad blocking software. This is unfortunate, as in most cases, the merchant is simply trying to track their advertising efforts, and has obviously given permission for the y.com site to place the image tag to help this effort. If the internet’s infrastructure were slightly different, this wouldn’t be an issue.
I take it we are back to the standard tools?
So once again, the tools at the disposal for the industry are URL tracking, first party cookies and third party cookies. URL tracking is usually the most reliable, as it can’t be easily disabled (the user would have to selectively erase part of a link and paste it into their browser when on a site to do this). Unfortunately, it is the most difficult to implement, especially for sites with little or no IT budget.
First party cookies are next most reliable. According to the most comprehensive studies, less than 1% of users have cookies turned off, and many sites are not navigable with them turned off. However, some merchants have trouble using first party cookies as well, because their ordering system is on a different domain that then their site; the first party cookie is essentially lost when the user tries to buy something (unless the cookie value is passed to the ordering site via the URL). Once again, IT resources and site infrastructure play a role here.
Third party cookies are a close third, as long as the company writing the cookie has the proper policies in place. The great majority of all third party tracking solutions use third party cookies to track, simply because there is almost no burden on the merchant’s IT team whatsoever. They don’t need to alter their site to pass the tracking id in the URL, and they don’t have to worry about making sure a cookie written on the landing page can be read at checkout. However they take orders, whatever domains a user must navigate in the process, all that is required by the merchant is to place one image tag on the receipt/confirmation page of their ordering system.
Still intrigued? Check out Essential Cookies Part Deux
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