Cookie Monsters

This week’s assignment asked us to choose a topic from Lesson 1 and Lesson 2 and try to tie it to a current article, blog or other news story. Over the past month, it’s been hard to read any news without reading something about Mitt Romney and Barack Obama. So I’ll go with the flow and start out with an article I recently read about how ad agencies are using cookies to tailor the political ads we see online.

One such company, CampaignGrid.com, collects 18 different online "attributes" for every voter and then sells the data to campaigns. Campaigns use the data to target their political ads. You’ve probably been included in this massive data mine. The information is connected to your computer via cookies, not your name or physical address. Technically you’re still anonymous and no privacy laws are violated (Bradford, 2012).

The entire scheme is based on cookies. I don’t know too much about cookies so I did a little research. Cookies are small pieces of data sent from a website into a web browser. There are “transient” cookies which dissolve when we leave a website and “persistent” cookies which remain until we delete them. Cookies are the basis for all web analytics. Without them there is no such thing as web analytics.

I’m a website analysts worst nightmare. I delete my cookies weekly, sometimes daily. Do you? How often? I bet if you knew Mitt Romney and Barack Obama were sneaking a peak into your “attributes” based on your cookies, you’d have deleted them more often too.

As a marketer and web analyst, it’s important to consider the impact of visitors who delete their cookies. A recent study by comScore (in Australia) concluded that cookie deletion causes overstatements when measuring the size of online audiences – by as much as 2.7 times (comStore, 2011). The impact of cookie deletion is that a single user may be counted as multiple visitors by analytical software. A “unique visitor” may inadvertently be counted as several “unique visitors” when in fact the visitor should have been counted as a “repeat visitor.”

In Europe, the EU’s new Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive requires that user’s explicitly allow website to leave cookies on their machines. Visitors will be asked to “opt-in” or “opt-out” before a cookie can be placed on their machine – redirecting every visitor to a cookie information and opt-in page. The law also requires that you list on your web site all of the cookies that get set by your web site, and the purpose of each cookie (O’Reilly, 2011).

This will be an even larger challenge for European marketers as it will cause a huge decrease in cookies on machines. Marketers will lose grip on key web analytical components. I do wonder if these same laws are soon to be considered here in the United States.

I cannot find any general rules of thumb for how to count for cookie deletion. But I feel it’s an issue that will grow over time. It can wreck havoc on our ability to measure key web visit metrics. I’m looking for more information and welcome your feedback.

Sources:

Bradford, Harry. "Web Cookies Used By Companies To Tailor Political Ads You See Online." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 23 Oct. 2012. Web. 05 Nov. 2012. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/23/companies-web-cookies-political-ads_n_2005723.html?utm_hp_ref=business>.

O'Reilly, Dennis. "Disable Third-party Cookies in IE, Firefox, and Google Chrome." CNET. N.p., 14 Mar. 2011. Web. 05 Nov. 2012. <http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-20042703-285/disable-third-party-cookies-in-ie-firefox-and-google-chrome/>.

"The Impact of Cookie Deletion on Site-Server and Ad-Server Metrics in Australia: An Empirical ComScore Study." ComScore.com, Jan. 2011. Web. 5 Nov. 2012. <http://www.comscore.com/Insights/Presentations_and_Whitepapers/2011/The_Impact_of_Cookie_Deletion_on_Site-Server_and_Ad-Server_Metrics_in_Australia_An_Empirical_comScore_Study>.