Savvy Web Consumers Delete Cookies, Big Time
Is behavioral targeting about to be “killed” (no) thanks to (over) zealous privacy advocates?
Cookie-based ad serving is, in fact, already at big risk, due to ongoing cookie deletion practices of savvy Web consumers, contrary to incredulous “No one cares about cookies,” and “Web cookies never interrupt your dinner” long-live “relevant” ads blogosphere dissing of momentum building for Internet “do-not-track” lists.
What are the Web’s “tasty” cookies all about?
A cookie is a very small text file inserted on a user’s computer by a Web server and is unique to that computer’s browser. Cookies are often used by Web servers to identify users and for authenticating, tracking and maintaing specific information about users. First party cookies are those left on a computer by a Web site that has been visited, while third-party cookies are those left by a domain differnet than the site being visited, such as an advertiisng server that has just delivered an ad to a computer, or certain third-party tools to measure site traffic (comScore).
comScore alerted Internet businesses to a significant, real-world cookie problem earlier in the year: CONSUMERS ARE PRO-ACTIVELY BLOCKING COOKIE TRACKING, BIG TIME.
Consumers are clearing cookies from their computers, thereby causing servers to deposit new cookies and hampering reliance on cookie-based server data, at a rate of a third of all Internet users:
About 3 in every 10 Internet users delete their cookies in a month, with an average deletion frequency of about 4 times per month.
Apparently, Web users are NOT all clamoring for ads made special, “just for them.”
While many assert the online advertising goal is to “find tracking that consumers will accept,” Web marketers must come to terms with the reality that many, many consumers will accept NO tracking.
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