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What are the “website cookies” we are talking about?

Cookies are the small temporary files (less than a kb in size generally) stored in the user’s browser without his or her notice by the websites they are visiting. These cookies typically contain data to identify an individual, which is used to calculate specifically metrics like Unique Visitors in Web Analytics. And, Online Marketers use this to deliver more targeted content and advertising by tracking their repeat visits and behavior. Webmasters use these cookies to authenticate the users upon login.

Cookie Deletion Rate: Based on several reports over the last few years from comScore and Netratings – 30% to 40% users delete the cookies in their browsers in any given month. What does that mean is marketers are not able to directly get the insights for their repeat visits and leverage the data from there. People delete cookies from their browsers as they don’t want to be identified on the internet and/or feel they slow down the system/internet speed.

Visitors Privacy Problem: Well, it is the fact that people want privacy which I don’t think anybody disagrees and on the internet it is even more important as more often users relate privacy to the information security on the web.

Tracking mechanisms like cookie tracking using a small client side javascript were built and started extensively using now in the industry. These kind of systems were built in those days and majorly relied on when many of the web users were not aware of the cookies or even didn’t know that their behavior on the web is being tracked elsewhere. Now increasingly people are getting educated and know how to and what to delete from their browsers. There are also paid tools that helps users to browse privately.

Lastweek, Microsoft has released the first beta version of the Internet Explorer 8 with a couple of privacy features “InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking”. And, they are just a click away for the users to activate it.

When users launch an InPrivate Browsing session, all traces of their browsing session disappear when they close that instance of the browser. Cookies, temporary Internet files, browsing history, form information, and usernames and passwords — all of them just vanish. In addition to InPrivate Browsing, InPrivate Blocking would stop websites sharing the users browsing behavior with the other websites. Though there are several Privacy Adons for FireFox, it is said to be developing similar features in built in the coming versions.

Source: W3Schools.com

With these advancements in the browsers, the majority of the users would soon be able to control their privacy on the web. Though it is a positive indicator to the web industry as a whole, web marketers would need to look at the alternative ways of measuring the metrics more accurately. I hope ISP and Panel data collection methods would get a boost. I think we should start thinking about new ways to calculate Unique Visitors Metric and life time value metrics.

Targeted Advertising and Real time advertising is going to be down in next couple of years as with the introduction of private browsing in Internet Explorer and hoping the other browser providers would follow the same.

——-Updated on google chrome browser on September 2nd 2008——-

Here is the Google Chrome’s Privacy Feature “incognito” – It opens separate window to browse and this is what Google is saying on the feature briefly “all new cookies are deleted after you close the incognito window” . That means it is going to add up to the cookie deletion rate we are talking above.

Google Chrome’s inCognito Window:

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