Monday, August 15, 2005
Anti-spyware may be limiting marketing effectiveness
Anti-spyware programs are making it harder for marketers to track campaign effectiveness because so many people are preventing third-party cookies.
Cookies are small text files that are sent to your computer by Web sites that you are visiting. They can only be read by the Web site that sent them.
However, on commercial sites there are likely to be images in a Web page that are coming from domains other than the one you think you are visiting.
Those images, usually banner advertisements and tracking images from Web analytics companies, enable those "third parties" to send you a cookie, too.
(A first-party cookie is one that comes from the domain you are visiting - the one in the URL that you can see in your browser's address box. A third-party cookie comes from someone else whose images are embedded in the Web page you are looking at.)
More on this in "Spyware Heats Up the Debate Over Cookies" in today's New York Times:
"Antispyware programs often leave in place first-party cookies, which can save users the inconvenience of having to log in to a news site each time they visit, but remove third-party cookies, the main target of users' ire. Some people say they think that total anonymity is the way to go.
The threat to the bottom line is real. Mr. Peterson said cookies not only helped sites measure overall profitability, but were critical in measuring the effectiveness of individual advertising campaigns. Marketers, for instance, could conceivably pay a Web site to deliver ads to 100,000 people, but only reach about 60,000 because so many of them were being counted twice.
'If you're O.K. with getting your ads to half as many people, and not really being sure how effective your campaign was, well then you can happily put your head in the sand,' Mr. Peterson said. 'Most people tell us they want data more accurate than that.'"
WebTrends, the Web statistics application, reports that sites find they have 10-15% more unique visitors when Web sites switch from third-party cookies to first-party cookies to track visits (that is, they switch to WebTrends from hosted competitors like WebSideStory's HitBox).
This, along with HTML e-mail image-blocking, is a real trend to watch in Internet marketing.
posted by Tim Beidel at 8/15/2005 09:55:00 AM
