Cookies on the website causing a drop off in traffic

[U19977]

W e are experiencing significant issues with data tracking in Adobe due to our cookie implementation. As a result, a large portion of our data dropped, making it unrepresentative of actual performance. This has raised growing concerns among stakeholders regarding the accuracy and reliability of Adobe data.

As we need to ensure compliance, we are unable to make any changes to our cookie settings on our end. Given this constraint, could you advise if there is a solution to fix this? 

[bjoern__koth]

Hi @U19977 

if you mean Adobe cookies, may I ask 

• what exactly do you mean with "cookie implementation"?
• and what cookie issues you are encountering
• which consent management platform you use
• which tag management, presumably Launch?

Compliance is important, but typically cookies written by Adobe are not really impacted by the CMP.

You will have to make sure the tags are properly fired once consent is given, and the cookies written by the Adobe tools should be all good.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I am not sure how cookies are causing lack of tracking on your site? Can you please explain more about your current setup and what recent changes were made?

I am guessing that maybe you recently introduced an Opt-In/Out solution... when you did this, did you stop all analytics tracking when users opted out? You have to check what your cookie consent options are actually saying... are you asking people to opt out of the "fingerprinting cookies" (which would actually cause inflation of your UVs due to not tracking return users are being "return" but a new user), or are you actually allowing those users to opt completely out of analytics?

[U19977]

I'm referring to our website cookies that enables users to choose whether or not we can track their data. We use OneTrust for this. If the user opts out, we cannot track anything in Adobe. In the past, we used to have 'Performance Cookies' enabled by default, but we had to change this to be compliant with new regulations, which resulted in a drop in our data.  This is because now, users have to manually go to Settings and enable the Performance Cookies option and not that many people do this. 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

But that says "cookies" not "tracking in general"...

Now, I don't know what your legalese says, how it's written or what you are including in the opt-in/opt-out process... but based on how most of these things are worded, users are only optioning out of the fingerprinting cookies in this scenario.. not tracking completely....

But again, that is a question for your legal department....

However, if you are in fact treating this as "opt out of all tracking" then there is nothing you can do.... if you are only opting out of cookies, then you should be able to prevent the fingerprinting cookies from "identifying the user between visits" and still track the general analytics of your pages.

If you are using WebSDK, this seems harder for some reason, the opt-out options don't seem to be available in the combined analytics / identify extension... but there should be some solution.

[bjoern__koth]

Well, I would say this is how cookie consent is supposed to work, isn't it?

If your local laws prescribe to ask the user whether he allows you to set Performance cookies and he denies, than that's the reality.

If you are using OneTrust, the tool allows you to enable consent tracking by category, which should at least give you the rough numbers of people who opted out.

From there on, you can potentially interpolate missing Visits, Page Views, etc.

Maybe worthwhile mentioning that Analytics is about trends and not hard numbers.

There are so many aspects that will additionally affect whether or not you actually do track a user and how.

Think about ad blockers, browser limiting cookie lifetimes, etc.

[manojs57813206]

@U19977  are you blocking the tag firing for Adobe tags if the performance cookies are by default is turned off, in that case you will loose loads of traffic, and every less people will go and accept the performance cookie. the only way i can see is that you have to make sure customer makes a choice before they can enter in your website. it this case it possible that customer might allow performance cookie to fire