April 26, 2005
People Lie. Another Look at the Cookie Scare
I read a whitepaper a week ago from Atlas titled “Is the Sky Falling on Cookies?” by Young-Bean Song, Director of Analytics & Atlas Institute. I was going to wait until it was available on the Atlas Institute Insights website before writing about it in case it wasn’t publicly available yet, but Brad Waller wrote about it, so I guess it’s fair game.
This whitepaper is a follow up on a story by Jupiter Research entitled, Measuring Unique Visitors: Addressing the Dramatic Decline in the Accuracy of Cookie-Based Measurement where they report, among other things that “as many as 39% of online users may be deleting cookies from their primary computer monthly, undermining the usefulness of cookie-based measurement and leaving many site operators flying blind.”
This story caused a flurry of responses, message board discussions, and blogs (Jeff Molander,
MarketingVox, Linda Buquet, and Shawn Collins to name a few…)
Anyway, the Atlas story presented a different angle that what people say is not necessarily what they do. People lie.
Reminds me of the TV show House, where Dr. House and his band of young sexy docs can’t to solve the case until they realize that their patient is lying to them about their condition or history.
This just in…the sky isn’t falling
According to the Song, while the various studies show that 39 - 55% of users report to delete cookies at least monthly, the actual behavior is much different. For example, Song reports that the users who report to delete their cookies weekly actually delete their cookies on average every 47 days. And it goes up from there. Brad posted more numbers in his story.
Granted, it’s in Atlas’ best interest to downplay these reports. But it is a plausible story. Just look in the mirror.
What’s Going on Here?
Well, it seems that it’s become fashionable to delete cookies. Or at least it’s shameful to admit that you allow yourself to be tracked online. “Cookies? Pure evil. Of course I delete them. Every week. Yeah.”
I remember a discussion several years ago with an executive (a technical one) from a certain affiliate marketing company I used to work for. He told me that he had his computer rigged to automatically take care of the cookie deletion process. Ironic, huh? Was that really just braggadocio?
Why did cookies get such a bad reputation? And how did they get so much attention? Do you think if they were called, “persistent website memory” instead of sharing a name with a delicious snack, a word that every child learns from year-one (it was my first word), they would get such mainstream attention?
And what’s the big deal anyway? So what if some marketing companies can associate my online being with several other websites that I’ve visited. What are they going to do with it? Show me a relevent advertisement? I’ll take that over erectile disfunction emails any day. And I wonder how many of these people who (say they) delete cookies routinely happily plunk down their American Express card everywhere they possibly can. Do they think AMEX isn’t keeping track? Think again. At least Amex is smart enough to not name their tracking technology after something yummy.
Delete cookies? Bah. Personally, I think they’re pretty damn cool and that the internet would suck without them.
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