How to track before marketing cookie consent?

[AnkitGhosh]

Can we use Adobe Analytics to track user’s before we get consent?

My client is in tech industry, and we think we are loosing on a ton of data because the tracking only starts when the user “allows for marketing cookies” on the pop-up. Like how to track before getting user consent? A limited tracking.

Is there a way to have a partial tracking without cookies? I did found this tool called analytics tool which does this - can we move its data to Adobe or do this exact thing without using another too?

[bjoern__koth]

Hi @AnkitGhosh ,

the reality these days is that due to cookie consent and ad blockers, you may lose maybe around 30% of data.

there are many discussions in these forums around this. Adobe Anslytics does not provide a truly cookieless tracking.

The classic AppMeasurement analytics library has an option to set cookie lifetime to session, yet it still uses cookies to fulfill the job. I am not a lawyer and imho this is a grey zone that your client's legal department should decide whether that's legal or not.

This cookie lifetime setting does not exist in the WebSdK though.

I typically try to teach my clients that this is the nature of things if you have a legally compliant setup, and that analytics is about trends and not exact values. If you want to have exact values, ask your data warehouse people who process the orders in the backend.

[EurosIMS]

Hi @AnkitGhosh, 

What @bjoern__koth says is correct- you really should try & explain that working around cookie consent isn't really in the spirit of the law/regulations. 

However, it is possible to add a cookieless server call that occurs on eg. One Trust interactions, cookie banner clicks, etc. that sends data into Analytics. The call will typically have no identifying data but it can send an event, a prop or eVar with categories accepted/declined, & almost any other data eg. UTM channels, tracking codes, so you can quantify influence on those channels for example. You won't be able to tie this data to the visit but it will give you an idea of loss if you don't have that data anywhere else. 

The other option is to put together a cookieless implementation, so that the entire Analytics set up doesn't use any cookies at all. 

The second option, as you can imagine, requires an extremely competent developer, although the first option should be possible with a bit of research by most users with experience of Launch/JavaScript.

[Devyendar]

Agree with @bjoern__koth and @EurosIMS, cookie consent is a legal compliance requirement in many regions, if client's legal team is okay they can mark Adobe Analytics cookies as required cookies and not as Marketing cookies to capture all the data.

Other work around is Client's team build their own first party Id, implement Adobe Analytics in server-side and use it for identifying visitors. This approach has its own limitations and additional considerations where Adobe Analytics will no longer use ECID and will not work along with Target or campaign.