Cookies are a fundamental mechanism used in advertising industry for ad personalisation and behavioural targeting, re-targeting, frequency capping and much more (see my earlier post about how cookies are used in today’s internet).
Nowadays, majority of ad technology providers that are disrupting* advertising industry are still relying on cookies to a great extent.
With recent bad publicity around cookies, new european legislation (so called Cookie law) and new default settings in various web browsers (e.g. enabled DNT headers in Internet Explorer, blocking 3rd party cookies in Firefox and Safari), it is becoming critical to start looking for alternatives and implementing them.
Web trackers (called also web bugs, beacons, pixels or tracking tags) are used in tracking visitor behaviour/activity on websites. In this post I explore workflow of a web analytics tracker as well as point out potential pitfalls and issues to pay attention to when designing your own tracker.
