Cookieless World a Pain for Online Marketers? It’s No Problem with Personyze!
There’s a lot of buzz these days in online marketing circles about the increased crackdown on cookies by big tech and government regulation, and all the difficulties this could cause for online marketing. But will personalization be disrupted in a cookieless world? The good news is that the cookie crackdown won’t make much difference for Personyze users, and this blog post will explain why.
Types of Cookies, and Their Uses
Cookies, for those who don’t know, are short bits of data created by websites and placed on your browser, to then be seen by other websites and used for various purposes. Some cookies just keep you logged in as you browse various pages on a website after login, while others may be used to associate you with your profile in the website’s CRM (in other words, to match you to your profile in their customer management system), and some are used to inform websites what you’re interested in, and how to advertise to you.
Cookies are typically divided into first-party, and third-party types. First-party cookies are cookies that are only used on the website you’re looking at, for instance, if you’re on bigstore.com, and they assign you a cookie to keep you logged in as you shop, that cookie isn’t going to any other website (or “third-party”), so it’s contained more-or-less within your browsing experience on that one website. This is known as a cookie’s domain attribute, in this case, the domain is bigstore.com, and if you go to some other website, bigstore.com’s cookies won’t be used.
However, in some cases, websites may have third-party cookies, which are cookies from other domains besides the website you’re looking at. Let’s say, in this case, adverts.com has a third-party banner ad on bigstore.com, which loads as you browse the site. When this happens, information is sent back to that third-party website, adverts.com, so that they know you were looking at bigstore.com. However, when you look at onlineshop.com, another website with a banner from adverts.com, then adverts also knows that you looked at that shop.
As you can see, adverts.com can start to piece together a browsing history for you, of all the websites you’ve looked at with their advertisements, which can tell quite a bit about what you’re interested in, and this data can then be sold to advertisers or used for various marketing purposes.
A Cookieless World, or a Third-Party Cookieless World?
The good news is that it’s only this latter type of cookie, the third-party, that privacy advocates are mainly concerned about, and authorities are cracking down on. You can sort of see their perspective, why should someone get to track your browsing behavior across so many websites, just because they were able to load their cookie onto all those sites through advertising or whatever means? You didn’t consent to that.
So, you see, what people are really talking about when they speak of a “cookieless world” is really just a third-party cookieless world.
A world without third-party cookies may cause problems for some types of advertisers, but for users of Personyze, its no big deal. That’s because the Personyze cookie is a first-party cookie, it doesn’t trade data with any third parties, it’s just used to track visitors on your website (and yours alone), to pay attention to their behaviors and attributes across sessions, and provide a personalized experience. Personyze can use third-party cookies, if they are present and contain relevant information, but it certainly doesn’t rely on them for 99.9% of its functionality.
So, how likely is a first-party cookieless world? Pretty darn unlikely.
That’s because our experience on websites would be much less smooth and more of a hassle, if first-party cookies weren’t allowed. First party cookies are what’s used to remember our preferences, our settings, our language preferences, our log-in data, and all sorts of other things that are much more along the lines of convenient and necessary, rather than creepily tracking our activities across the web to sell to advertisers (we’re looking at you, third-party cookies).
First-party is what Personyze has been using all along, just tracking your visitors’ interactions with your website to create a more smooth and optimized experience. Nothing covert or creepy about that, in fact we’ve all come to expect websites to pay attention to what we do and adapt to our needs and preferences, these days.
So, if you’re worried about how a (third-party) “cookieless world” may impact your plans for website personalization, you needn’t give it another moment’s thought, if you’re using Personyze.
