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220 Part 1 Introduction

B Online ordering systems. This enables a site such as Tesco.com to track what is in
your basket as you order different products.
C Tracking within a site. Web analytics software such as Webtrends
(www.webtrends.com) which analyses statistics on visitors to web sites relies on
persistent cookies to find the proportion of repeat visitors to a web site. Webtrends
and other tools increasingly use first-party cookies since they are more accurate
and less likely to be blocked. Marketers should check whether use of first-party
cookies is possible on their site.
D Tracking across sites. Advertising networks use cookies to track the number of times
a particular computer user has been shown a particular banner advertisement; they
can also track adverts served on sites across an ad network. There was an individual
rights outcry in the late 1990s when Doubleclick was using this to profile customers.
Doubleclick no longer operates an ad network, partly because of this.
Affiliate networks and pay-per-click ad networks such as Google Adwords and Yahoo!
Search services (Overture) may also use cookies to track through from a click on a
third-party site to a sale or lead being generated on a destination or merchant site.
These approaches tend to use third-party cookies. For example, if conversion tracking
is enabled in Google Adwords, Google sets a cookie when a user clicks through on an
ad. If this user buys the product, then the purchase confirmation page will include
script code supplied by Google to make a check for a cookie placed by Google. If
there is a match, the sale is attributed to Adwords. An alternative approach using third-
party tracking is that different online campaigns have different tracking parameters or
codes within the links through to the destination site and when the user arrives on a
site from a particular source (such as Google Adwords) this is identified and a cookie
is set. When purchase confirmation occurs, this can then be attributed back to the
original source, e.g. Google Adwords and the particular referrer.
Owing to the large investments now made in pay-per-click marketing and affiliate
marketing by many companies, this is the area of most concern for marketers since
the tracking can become inaccurate. However, sale should still occur even if the
cookies are blocked or deleted, so the main consequence is that the ROI of online
advertising or pay-per-click marketing may look lower than expected. In affiliate
marketing, this phenomemon may benefit the marketer in that payment may not need
to be made to the third party if a cookie has been subsequently deleted (or blocked)
between the time of original clickthrough and sale.

Privacy issues with cookie use
The problem for Internet marketers is that, despite these important applications, blocking
by browsers, such as Internet Explorer, or security software and deletion by users has
increased dramatically. In 2005 Jupiter Research claimed that 39% of online users may
be deleting cookies from their primary computer monthly, although this is debated.
Many distrust cookies since they indicate a ‘big brother’ is monitoring your actions.
Others fear that their personal details or credit card details may be accessed by other
web sites. This is very unlikely since all that cookies contain is a short identifier or
number that is used to link you to your record in a database. Anyone who found the
cookie wouldn’t be able to log on to the database without your password. Cookies do
not contain passwords, credit card information or any personal details as many people
seem to think. These are held on the site servers protected by firewalls and usernames
and passwords. In most cases, the worst that someone can do who gets access to
your cookies is to find out which sites you have been visiting.
It is possible to block cookies if the user finds out how to block them, but this is not
straightforward and many customers either do not know or do not mind that their