- Who stole my cookies?
My fellow marketeers - do not despair. They might have taken our cookies, but their finger prints remain.
A cookie … is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user’s web browser while a user is browsing a website. When the user browses the same website in the future, the data stored in the cookie is sent back to the website by the browser to notify the website of the user’s previous activity. - Wikipedia
The Cookie
For nearly two decades the cookie has been a great tool for publishers and marketeers in creating a personalized user experience online, and analyzing data to constantly improve this experience.
Thanks to the cookie technology, customers can visit websites like Amazon.com and be greeted by their first name and get instant recommendations on books and other products that match their taste.
Thanks to cookies, marketers can analyse how people browse websites, via analytics tools like Google Analytics, and gather intelligence in order to improve user experience and conversion rates.
Used in the right way, tracking technology is a win-win deal for both consumers and businesses.
A Crumbling Technology (pun intended)
However, this neat little piece of technology is facing the possibility of extinction due to misuse, governmental regulations, user boycott and the fact that they don’t work on mobile devices.
Apart from a good PR-campaign to educate consumers about the upsides (personalisation and more relevant ads), it needs to be fixed. So, what can be done about it?
Finger Prints
When cookies disappear, you have to look for fingerprints. That is exactly what the innovators in the industry are doing. In a recent Forbes article a new technology coined Fingerprinting is introduced:
This technique allows a web site to look at the characteristics of a computer such as what plugins and software you have installed, the size of the screen, the time zone, fonts and other features of any particular machine. These form a unique signature just like random skin patterns on a finger. - Forbes
The company behind this technology is the New York based firm Tapad, which was recently profiled by Forbes.
Says Norwegian founder and CEO, Are Traasdahl: - All of this insight, no one has been able to give that to marketers before.
The Norwegian entrepreneur has already hired 44 new people to the growing startup this year, and is opening a new office in London this year.
Tracking Across Multiple Devices
While cookies are limited to one device, fingerprinting lets marketeers track user behaviour across multiple devices, and that means deeper insight into what works.
Writes J.J. Colao at Forbes: “Tapad ran a monthlong campaign that increased its click-through rates by 300%. That let the carrier calibrate its marketing budget, since it knew which devices, used at key times, correlated with a transaction.”
Relevancy
Time will show how long this technology will survive in the heated privacy debate. As a marketeer and a consumer, however, I believe the positive effects outshine the negative ones.
I admit. Ads can be a nuisance. So why not make them more relevant? As a fresh alpine skiing enthusiast, a banner ad promoting charter trips to the Austrian Alps would be a welcome guest, contrary to the uninvited pest trying to push some dodgy get-rich scheme.
Wouldn’t you agree?
