Important: Jupiter Research study on cookies!!!

[Maxfalcon]

-> xhttp://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3489636
-> xhttp://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLC,GGLC:1970-01,GGLC:en&q=Jupiter+Research+cookies

Jupiter Research confirms my study that around 40% (number that I stated myself at CAP) users are deleting cookies very often. Three months ago I was already as alarmist as they are.

When you know that cookies are the only way to track return sales, and sometimes even first-shot sales...

Some industry insiders are already considering new ways to track users, such as flash animations, but I don't know more about this.

I will be interested to know if casino affiliate programs knows about this study, what they think and if they are planning to do something in the near futur (2005-2006).

Study: Consumers Delete Cookies at Surprising Rate
› › › ClickZ News

By Rob McGann | March 14, 2005



Nearly 40 percent of Internet users delete cookies from their primary computers on at least a monthly basis, according to a study by JupiterResearch. The finding has big implications for advertising and marketing firms that depend on cookies for tracking and targeting.

Based on a survey of 2,337 U.S. respondents, the study finds that 17 percent of Internet users delete cookies on a weekly basis. Approximately 12 percent do so on a monthly basis, and 10 percent make it a daily habit.

"The key finding is that a lot of companies have placed a lot of reliance on cookies for audience measurement and the cookie is at risk as a mechanism for tracking people over time," said Eric Petersen, the lead analyst on the report.

The trend challenges the notion that cookie-based methods produce accurate measurements for marketers. Measurements affected by the deletion of cookies include the number of returning visitors, unique visitors, multi-session campaign conversions, and lifetime value. Techniques like behavioral targeting and personalization are also highly dependant on cookies.

"Advertisers using lifetime value metrics need to reexamine how accurate that data is," Petersen said. "The further away you get from the date the cookie was set, the less likely that the information is completely accurate."

The primary reason consumers remove cookies is that they believe cookies threaten their privacy and security online. Consumers also lack an understanding of the time saving benefits cookies provide, Petersen said.

"For some reason, consumers have identified cookies incorrectly as spyware," he added. "Consumers don't understand what cookies do."

The report found 28 percent of Internet users are selectively rejecting third party cookies, such as those placed by online ad networks. One company researchers interviewed said the number of visitors blocking third-party cookies has increased from less than three percent in January 2003 to 14 percent of visitors in January 2005. Peterson suggested site owners should turn instead to first-party cookies as a standard.

The report suggests that site owners also consider a registration/log-in model, which would allow publishers to re-set deleted cookies. For high-traffic sites where that would be impractical, Peterson suggests they consider using Macromedia Flash's local shared objects, which are less likely to be spotted and removed by anti-spyware programs.

Companies with high-consideration products should pay particularly close attention to the conclusions of the report, said Bryan Eisenberg, co-founder of Future Now.

"From a Web analytics point of view, latency trafficking will be more difficult to do," Eisenberg said. "For sites with products that have long sales cycles, it will be even more difficult to do, because you can't track that traffic over time

[Ace Fun]

Isn't it amazing that flash is considered as an alternative. Cookies represent no security threat or privacy threat whatsoever (unless they are combined with j/s exploits). Flash uses active-x, which is the highest risk feature you can enable in your browser. It's the equivalent of installing a program directly from your CD reader.

Maybe the fault is with the search engines. A lot of people don't want their searches "optimised", they want the engines to do as they are told and not return a load of advertising spam, targetted or not.

[Maxfalcon]

Maybe the fault is with the search engines.

The real fault is due to anti-spyware programs. It's these programs that all have labeled cookies as spywares in results. I don't see the interest for adaware or spybot to delete cookies. Internet Explorer and other browsers have the option built in...

Before those programs, far less people where even knowing that a cookie was a file in your computer. Now I heard people knowing nothing about computers asking me "what are cookies, must I delete them?".

I would like real discussions between major affiliate programs from all sectors / ad networks / tracking software companies and the developers of anti-spyware programs, in first adaware and spybot.

They must realize that they are doing more bad than good, for people working on Internet as well as people browsing internet.

As for flash, yes this is really amazing and it was the last thing I would have thought for a solution...

[Maxfalcon]

Interesting thread about this issue:
-> xhttp://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=4856&page=1&pp=20