Why some cookies are better than others
Online retailers that use third-party cookies for web data capture aren’t getting a complete view of customer behavior, according to data from the Coremetrics LIVEMark index. The data, based on an index of more than 150 Coremetrics analytics customers whose transactions represent more than $5.3 billion in annual sales, show that 13.8% of traffic to web sites that use third-party cookies was anonymous, meaning a user has either blocked cookies or opted out of tracking.
That’s an increase of 8.3% over last year, but by contrast, sites that used first-party cookies recorded anonymous traffic of less than 1% during the same period. .
“The ability to capture and store web behaviors in lifetime profiles is critical for e-commerce organizations looking to understand the value of online investments,” says Joe Davis, CEO of Coremetrics. “When tracking cookies are rejected by such a large group of users, it significantly impacts the size of the population that can be accurately profiled.”
Third-party cookies are set on the user’s browser by a web site other than the one which a user is visiting. They are commonly used to track site visitors` web page use for advertising or other marketing purposes. Better for tracking purposes are first-party cookies, says Davis: cookies that are set on a user’s browser by the web site the user is visiting. They’re already commonly used to store information, such as user preferences of visitors to the sites. Coremetrics technology allows clients to migrate their systems from issuing third-party to first-party cookies without the loss of customer data, according to the company. “By migrating to solutions that issue first-party cookies, e-commerce organizations can expand the amount of data they can capture and the breadth of consumer behavior they can measure accurately,” Davis adds.
Anonymous traffic representing site visitors that either blocked cookies or opted out of tracking using the site’s privacy policy spanned retail verticals in the Coremetrics index. A total of 16.4% of visits to the specialty retailer sites in the index, for example, were anonymous and could not be tracked. Similarly non-trackable traffic represented 15.3% of visits to home sites among retailers in the index, while 14.8% of visits to office and electronics sites, 13.8% of visits to gift sites, 13.5% of visits to apparel sites, 12.8% of visits to sports/outdoors sites and 12.4% of general merchandiser sites could not be tracked.
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