When cookies are attacked – so is personalization
ITP and its family of cookie killer initiatives have turned accountability in advertising and targeting on its heads. From now on it will be much more difficult to identify user behavior across websites and even tracking the same user on the same website. Being able to recognize a previous visitor on the same device on the same domain is paramount for any site personalization or analytics solution. Without it all visitors will be registered as new visitors which fundamentally undermines the purpose of personalization.
Everything is impacted
All analytics platforms are impacted by the attack on cookies and so are site testing and personalization platforms like Monoloop.
3rd party cookies are now routinely being blocked by Safari and Firefox. In the future we will see similar behavior on Chrome.
Even 1st party cookies are being limited. 1st party cookies being set by the browser will be treated like secondary citizens in the future. All script writable data (from the browser) will be strictly regulated by your browsers going forward – including 1st party cookies and local storage.
Only exception for the rule will be server side 1st party cookies. Like client cookies – they are strictly isolated to your site domain – but they will survive the cookie carnage – for now.
In light of these challenges, we have made fundamental changes to how cookies are being used in Monoloop. We have moved away from client side cookie writing and now support server side cookie writing – this change will enable our cookies to survive the limitations currently put on 1st party cookies that are set client side on both Safari and FireFox.
These changes will comply with the new policies set by ITP, Safari, Firefox and later Chrome. Going forward Monoloop will write server side cookies if possible and only fallback to client set cookies if not.
Changes required by Monoloop users
In order for Monoloop to be able to set a server side cookie under your domain a change in your DNS settings will be required. You need to add a new CNAME record in your DNS settings. The CNAME record that is required is listed in your account Settings/DNS section and has the value format monoloop.yourdomain.com.
Reach out for further details.