Browser ‘cookies’ are the life blood of online marketing. They tells us where our site traffic comes from, in what quantities and what it does when it gets there. But the humble Cookie is under threat from many angles. Come May 26 2012, European privacy laws come into force. All UK websites must offer users opt-in consent tools to allow cookies to pass information about browsing activities to 3rd parties. So here’s our brief and easy to read slide pack giving you an overview and highlighting options.

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2. Who is Greenlight?
I should begin my presentation by declaring any interests by explaining a little about
Greenlight, the agency I represent in the capacity of Client Services Director.
Greenlight started originally as a search marketing agency back in 2001 specialising in
natural search optimisation (SEO) and paid search advertising (PPC) but we have since
expanded to cover all forms on digital paid media, Social Media expertise and a full
strength data technology arm to allow us to provide better strategic value to clients.
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3. What is a cookie?
And it is data that I want dwell on today starting with the humble cookie.
Browser ‘cookies’ are the life blood of online marketing. These tiny dumb text files tell us where
our site traffic comes from, in what quantities and what it does when it gets there.
I don’t know if you ever taken the time to look at one of the multitude of cookies that your web
browser stores but each cookie file is really no more than a string of variables written in a text
files usually around just 5 Kilobytes in size.
Cookies are integral to the delivery of two of online marketing's key USPs
personalisation and
tracking
They are used by essential systems such as:
Content management systems – enabling the personalisation tweaks which
improve site conversions
Site analytics systems that count the numbers that tell marketers how their site
is working
Ad delivery networks – that help marketers place ads and track their
effectiveness
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4. Why is it under threat?
Google’s use of secure servers
Google’s increasing use of secure servers for all logged in traffic means that
increasing amounts of natural traffic is now stripped of its valuable meta data
revealing precious information about its source. This first started about six
months ago in the US and was finally rolled out in the UK this month when we
started to experience this uncomfortable form of data blindness.
The meta information blocked by Google’s secure servers critically includes the
keyword entered in the user’s search query from which we can determine so
much about not just the motivation behind the user’s visit to a site but also the
effectiveness of our online marketing investment.
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5. Why is it under threat?
Multi-platform marketing
The second threat comes from the increasing use by consumers of a multitude of
different platforms. This means that an analytics system tuned to a single device
is no longer sufficient to reveal the full click-path of your potential customer.
As they hop from desktop to mobile to tablet each platform drops a different
cookie file to track usage on it. These files do not natively cross-reference, leaving
the marketer blind to the contribution to a sale from each channel and therefore
to the effectiveness of the marketing spend dedicated to it.
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6. Why is it under threat?
Last but by no means least is the legal threat
The EU Commission has been on the hunt for the cookie since the Directive on
Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations was first announced in 2003.
This rules that businesses must tell users about the cookies used on their
website, what the cookie is doing, and – crucially – gain their consent to use that
cookie.
Incredulous online marketers have been in denial about this slow burning but
fundamental threat to their existence ever since.
These regulations came into law in May last year but the Information
Commissioner’s Office (ICO), stated that they would not be enforced for the first
year which gives us just 1 month left to get compliant!
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7. Why is it under threat?
The Legal Threat
It is worth pointing out here that, in the eyes of the EU Commission, not all
cookies were created equal.
The table on the left of this slide shows a clear distinction between the activities
using cookies that the EU will accept without prior consent from the user
(shaded in green) and those that it will not (shaded in red). If it wasn’t before, it
should be clear now, that the Commission is particularly targeting the use of
cookies for explicitly marketing purposes. It specifically names:
the counting of unique visits to a website,
first and third party advertising, and
onsite personalised messaging to returning visitors
On the right you can see how the website of the UK’s Information
Commissioner’s Office has kindly added the consent box to its website to
show us all how it should be done.
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8. Despite this exemplary behaviour, 90% of visitors to the Information
Commissioner’s Office (ICO) website did not consent to their cookie.
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9. Why is this a problem?
On 25 January this year, the European Commission unveiled its full proposals for
far reaching changes to EU privacy legislation beyond eCommerce.
While the swanky media lawyers Olswang only "foresee the Regulation being in
force by 2015" they note gloomily that "every aspect of an organisation's
compliance obligations will increase – and there will be fines of up to 2% of
global turnover for breach".
At the risk of stating the obvious, the Direct Marketing Association said it had
“serious concerns” about the potential impact of some of the new Data
Protection Regulation’s requirements. It said:
“If the Regulation were to come into force tomorrow, then it would have costly
ramifications for companies involved with direct marketing, and in turn
detrimental consequences for the UK economy.”
So what are its concerns specifically?
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10. Why is this a problem?
1 - Opt-in / opt-out and obtaining consent
The new Regulation doesn’t go as far as
heralding a comprehensive opt-in only
regime for direct marketing - but it comes
close.
Companies will have to obtain explicit
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11. consent from consumers by ‘clear statement
or affirmative action’ (ie. clicking) to use
their data for marketing purposes.
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12. Why is this a problem?
2 - IP addresses
The new regulation would also class IP addresses as
personal data which would result in web analytics no
longer being available to companies without the
consent of individuals.
The additional impact on online user experience makes
this ruling a double-whammy as many sophisticated
websites make considerable use of cookies and IP data
to improve conversion rates by providing an enhanced
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13. user experience.
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14. Why is this a problem?
The right to be forgotten
The third specific issue is that companies currently holding an individual’s data
and passing them to third parties would not only have to delete that information,
they would have to ensure the third party deletes that information too. This
would spell disaster for data list brokers but companies would also have to face
increased data processing costs.
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15. Why is this a problem?
Free right of access to consumer data
Where companies currently have the right to charge £10 to recover some of the
costs of providing consumers with access to the data they hold on them, under
the new Regulation, companies would have to supply this information free of
charge.
In 2009, the Ministry of Justice estimated that UK businesses spend £50 million a
year in fulfilling subject access requests through added manpower costs.
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16. Why is this a problem?
Other issues
Marketers will need to secure parental consent to market to under 13s. While
this sounds sensible it is so impractical as to make it almost unviable.
All companies will need to keep data on record and demonstrate compliant data
management processes while companies with more than 250 staff will also need
to appoint a designated independent data protection officer.
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17. What can marketers do about it?
Online marketers have to re-examine how they track and optimise their
marketing spend in the light of the multiple threats to cookie-based data which
currently provides them with almost all their data.
What options are available?
1 – Look into the compliance of your site
2 – By making better use of the data that users do consent to provide through
cookies
3 – Make better use of non-cookie-based data gathering
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18. What can marketers do about it?
1 – Look into the compliance of your site
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many website owners don’t know how many cookies are
actually in use across their site. So the first task is simply to understand the
extent of the problem.
As you would expect, there are now a number of companies offering to help out
here. One that we have recommended to clients at Greenlight is called Optanon
and operates as a simple Chrome browser extension alerting you to each cookie
being used as you browse through your site.
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19. What can marketers do about it?
2 – By making better use of the data that users do consent to provide through
cookies
Multi-channel attribution
Marketers are increasingly turning to attribution models to understand the full impact of
their marketing investment across all channels. Measuring the weighted contribution of
each online marketing channel is a service offered by an increasing number of analytics
technology providers with varying degrees of user-friendliness.
However, the recent acquisition of AdInsight (to whom I owe this image) by Tagman
suggests that attributed tracking both online and offline is becoming a distinct possibility
with AdInsight tracking sales from websites to call-centres via unique telephone
numbers and Tagman attributing these sales back to online channels which previously
would otherwise have been left uncredited.
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20. What can marketers do about it?
2 – By making better use of the data that users do consent to provide through
cookies
The second way I would recommend to make better use of your precious cookie
data is behavioural segmentation. By collecting very granular data about each
user visit we can identify the common characteristics (such as source channel &
campaign, pages viewed or actions taken on the site) and segment users
according to their propensity to purchase.
The graphic above was supplied by QuBit, a relatively new tracking technology,
that enables marketers to view behaviourally attributed sales data in real time in
browser-based dashboards. However, the system does not stop there.
By creating customer segments based on behavioural attributes, the system can
then identify users by their likely segment which allows marketers to adjust the
messaging, product display or purchase path accordingly in order to achieve the
highest conversion rate for each user. The system can also push feedback
requests to users from each segment to provide specific responses to more
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21. granular questions that you might have.
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22. What can marketers do about it?
3 – Make better use of non-cookie-based data gathering.
Hydra - 1
Natural search traffic is, by definition, untracked until it gets to your site but
there are tools that can help to visualise the opportunity from non-paid search
results which, Google admits, attract on average 75% of the clicks from the
average search query.
The image here is taken from the Hydra platform and displays the natural search
keyword categories in terms of their total search volume (shown by the size of
the squares) and the impression share of the site against this volume (shown by
the colour, with green meaning good and red meaning poor).
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23. What can marketers do about it?
Hydra - 2
By overlaying the average position in Paid Search of the same keywords we can
start to formulate actions based on an integrated view of natural and paid search
activity.
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24. What can marketers do about it?
Hydra - 3
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25. What can marketers do about it?
Influencer Analysis
There are many so called ‘buzz monitoring’ tools that provide marketers with non-
cookie-based quantitative data on the proliferation of their brand on Social Media
platforms. While this is certainly interesting, it is often more useful to identify the key
influencers associated with a given topic in order to devise practical strategies on how to
engage with them to promote their product more effectively.
The Google+ tool ‘Ripples’ as shown is a great example of this and even allows you to
“play back” the spread of the influence on a given topic to show the viral effect in action.
The topic (as defined by a URL) I will show you now is the infamous Kony 2012 video on
YouTube. On the left you can see the standard YouTube statistics which tell you that the
video was viewed over 80 million times in its first week online and some data on the
sources and demographics of these viewers.
On the right you can see a more interesting visualisation of how this internet meme
conquered the world earlier this month and, specifically, who was responsible for
spreading it!
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As I play the video you can see the timing of each new post linking to the video, who sent
it and who in their sphere of influence passed it on.
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27. Recent headlines showed that Google is willing to test the EU Commission’s
mettle with a sweeping revision of its terms & conditions being deemed
incompliant. I suspect many marketers will be playing a dangerous waiting game
to see the outcome of this battle of the giants.
But only this week there was a new development on the legal saga that is the EU
Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive.
[Click]
No less an body than the UK’s Government Digital Service has weighed in to the
debate with their “Implementer’s Guide” to the Directive.
The GDS takes the view that web analytics are “essential to the effective
operation of government websites” and that “at present the setting of cookies is
the most effective [and “minimally intrusive”] way of doing this”.
They point to the following statement in the Information Commissioner’s
Guidance to justify their gamble that this fellow governmental body will not crack
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28. down on analytics: “Provided clear information is given about their activities we
are unlikely to prioritise first-party cookies used only for analytical purposes in any
consideration of regulatory action.”
Frankly this only serves to muddy the water as it is unlikely the ICO will be as
tolerant of a major private company making this same argument. So meanwhile,
the rest of us can return to our default position of checking our potential liability,
preparing our transparency and consent procedures and waiting it out while
hiding behind Google.
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