Users who refuse website tracking cookies are causing advertising headaches in several industries led by retail, telecommunications, and healthcare, according to a new study by Web market researchers WebTrends.
Third-party cookies track unique visitors and how they respond to marketing campaigns and Web promotions, but WebTrends said cookie rejection affects the accuracy of just about all such measurements, instead of shrinking accuracy gradually over weeks or months.
Retail experienced the highest cookie rejection level at 16.9 percent, with telecommunications next at 15.4 percent and health care coming in at 14.7 percent, WebTrends said in its May 23 report. The company also said cookie rejection rose from 2.84 percent of Web visits analyzed in January 2004 to 12.4 percent last month, driven mostly by third-party cookie-blocking software including firewalls, proxy servers, and settings in the Windows XP Service Pack 2 for Microsoft Internet Explorer.
WebTrends spokesman Corey Gault tells AVNOnline.com the company's newest research didn't isolate statistics on adult Internet third-party cookie rejection, "and I'm not sure how many customers fit in with using our program." The company's program includes first-party cookie management systems, rather than relying on the third-party cookies that so many surfers find annoying.
"Since we moved away from having a free service I don't think we have many [adult Internet clients], but I would expect you would be seeing high rates mixed in," Gault continues. "As a site owner, you can use cookies to make Web analytics more efficient and help to streamline your site so visitors can more easily navigate it, rather than just using a shotgun and seeing what hits. There's been a lot of automated solutions making third-party rejection particularly easy."
Gault also says most consumers misunderstand cookies. "It's almost like undue concern," he says, "but the fact is they are rejecting them more and more. And as a best practice, companies need to move to first-party cookies."
Cookie deletion inflates unique visitor counts artificially and degrades repeat visitor measurements, because visitors deleting cookies are marked wrongly as new visitors when they return to a website.
"The effects of cookie rejection typically result in the loss of unique and repeat visitor metrics, and in some extreme cases, the Web analytics system does not track the visit at all," the WebTrends report notes. "Report distortion from cookie rejection is much greater if the Web analytics solution heavily relies on cookies for purchase histories or campaign responses, or, as the solution's only method to sessionize visits."
