On The Trail

The cookie debate has died down somewhat, but the problem hasn’t gone away. I have 3 interesting datapoints from three different WebTrends installations:

1. Client #1 uses third party cookies set from “statse.webtrends.com.” They have 19.5% of “Visitors Not Accepting Cookies” (a WebTrends term that is pretty clear…). Now in this case these cookies would be third party cookies from a well known tracking domain, so this would be a worst case scenario. Client #1 is a large manufacturer of expensive products. Their audience is not particularly tech savvy or particularly corporate.
2. Client #2 uses third party cookies from “sdc.clientname.com” (in other words, a not well known tracking domain). They have 6% of “Visitors Not Accepting Cookies”. Their audience skews towards tech savvy and corporate.
3. Clients #3-#8 use first party cookies set via WebTrends’ tracking Javascript. The audiences are all across the map in terms of tech savviness and work/home mix. All have 1.1 +/- 0.2% “Visitors Not Accepting Cookies.”

All the percentages have been constant over the last 6 months.

Moral of the story: Use first party cookies.

(And, yeah, I know this is my first post since July. I’ll try to post more often from now on…)