What are cookies anyway?
When an internet user accesses a website, it leaves small text files in the history of the browser used. These files are called cookies and have changed fundamentally in purpose and use over the last two decades. What in the early days served to optimise the use of the website has become one of the most important tools in digital marketing in recent years.
So-called first-party cookies and second-party cookies are set as text files by the website operators themselves. They have the task of increasing user-friendliness (usability) and providing the best possible user experience. The example of an online shop shows how useful cookies of this type are:
Without cookies, the shopping cart would be empty every time the page is opened.
- Address data entered would have disappeared when the next web page was called up.
- A history of the last products called up is not available.
- Customer data entered would not be available the next time the shop was opened.
- and much more.
Despite frequent criticism of cookies in recent years, they perform a very important task for the smooth use of websites. In the meantime, these cookies are marked as “necessary for the website”.
How do cookies help with marketing?
Third-party cookies are worthwhile for marketing and advertising. A typical example are advertising partners of the site operators who place your ads on their website. A cookie is set as soon as a web page with the advertisement is called up. This remains permanently in the user’s browser history and applies across the board to all internet use, not just a specific online shop.
Over weeks and months, cookies can be used to analyse which websites a certain user prefers to visit. From this, preferences such as purchasing behaviour can be derived, which can be used specifically for the display of individual advertisements on the preferred websites.
What is useful for marketing can quickly be perceived as annoying by the individual user. Leaving behind many small traces of data that are used for marketing purposes often does not correspond to the ideas of maximum data security. For this reason, too, the days of third-party cookies may be numbered.
What is an internet user’s cache?
As a user, there are various ways to defend against the permanent storage of cookies. One active solution to combat the small files is to delete the cache. This belongs to every web browser and represents a temporary accumulation of all information that has arisen over use. Typical contents of the cache are:
- Cookies of all kinds
- History of the visited web pages
- Deposited user data
- Created and saved passwords
- Downloaded files
Every browser allows you to clear the entire cache with a simple click. All the above-mentioned information and much more would then be gone. Targeted deletion of individual contents such as cookies or passwords is also possible.
What influence does the cache have on internet use?
Even though most users are aware of the possibility of clearing the cache, in practice this rarely takes place actively. With most browsers, it is even possible to set automatic deletion of the cache as soon as the web browser is closed the next time. What is in the interest of data protection has an unpleasant effect on usability. Here are two examples:
If the cache is constantly cleared, no more customer information from online shops is available. The site visitor has to enter all login data again by hand each time. The shopping history or items that were placed in the shopping cart for a later time are also no longer available.
Media platforms such as YouTube or Spotify know which videos or artists the user likes via the usage history. Without setting cookies, it is no longer possible to track previous preferences. When calling up the YouTube homepage, the user would always be shown the latest trends, not personally interesting videos.
Why cookies could become extinct in digital marketing
In Switzerland, a cookie regulation has been in force since 2007, making it more difficult to track customers and their preferences. When accessing websites from the European Union, users often have to fight their way through more tick boxes to determine which cookies they allow and which they do not. In short, dealing with cookies has become inconvenient for privacy reasons.
It becomes even more problematic when users set an automatic clearing of the cache after closing the browser. This deletes the technically necessary cookie of the website in which the handling of third-party cookies was stored. The consequence: The next time the page is called up, the user must select the desired cookies again.
Does digital marketing work without cookies?
Many users have only realised through this active selection how intensively digital marketing is carried out with the setting of advertising cookies. For this reason, many marketers are looking for alternatives to obtain information from users by other technical means.
Alliances in which user information is exchanged are interesting for large internet corporations. A global corporation like Meta, which unites services like Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram under one roof, can track information of individual persons across platforms and use it for targeted marketing.
E-tags are a young alternative to cookies, which are technically similar, but cannot be blocked by refusing cookies in the page settings. Simply switching off the browser cache completely would prevent these files from being stored.
Marketers can only manage without cookies if advertisements are tailored to the explicit page content and not to the individual user. This is also more likely to please the mature internet user than being recognised worldwide by various service providers via an individual advertising ID.
