Every time you visit a website, one of the first things you see is their cookie policy.
Some sites use language like:
“We use cookies to make your experience on our site better. By using this site, you agree…”
The website’s cookie policy tells you that the site is using cookies to improve your experience on that site.
But the truth is that until you dig further into the site’s cookie policy, you may not know exactly the types of cookies the site is collecting and if these cookies pose any security risks to you.
In this guide, we will break down everything you need to know about web cookies:
- What are web cookies?
- The types of web cookies and their uses
- Their benefits and risks to you the user
- How to manage web cookies
- The common ways websites use Javascript cookies and more!
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What are web cookies?
Web cookies are small text files that contain bits of data stored in the browser folder on your computer’s hard drive whenever you visit a website.
When you visit a website, the site’s server creates bits of data about you which are stored on your computer. This data may contain account information, your shopping cart contents, pages you visited or even items you viewed on an ecommerce site.
The next time you visit that website, your browser sends information about your last visit to the server. This helps the website remember details about you and provide a better experience for you. For example, you add some items to your cart and close the webpage. If you visit that site again the next day, your items are still in your cart.
Types of web cookies
All web cookies are not created equal nor do they all serve the same functions. Depending on the type of cookie, it could persist on your browser as long as your session lasts, or for many months. Here are the 4 main types of cookies:
Session cookies
These are temporary web cookies that are only present as long as your web browser stays open or your session is active. Once you close your browser or your browser session becomes inactive (after a period of time), these cookies are removed from your device.
Session cookies have their uses in various websites. For example, ecommerce websites use session cookies to keep your cart items available while you peruse other product pages in search of new items you want to buy.
Persistent cookies
Persistent (Permanent) cookies last longer than session cookies. The website you visit creates this cookie and attaches an expiration date to them. By law, you can’t make persistent cookies last more than 6 months.
Websites use these types of cookies to remember information about you and provide better experiences. For example, a website can use permanent cookies to remember your login information so you don’t have to re-enter them every time you visit the site.
Third-party cookies
These cookies are created by a website you’re not visiting. These cookies are usually created by advertisers and associate you to a website where you clicked on an ad.
Third-party cookies gather data about your browsing habits. They allow advertisers to track you across multiple websites and serve ads to you wherever you go across the internet.
First-party cookies
These are the cookies created by the website you’re visiting. They are generally used to improve your experience on the site.
For example, these cookies help sites remember your language settings. When you first visit a website and change the language from English to French, the site creates a cookie to help it remember your choice. On your next visit, you see the website in the language you selected last time.
First-party cookies also perform functions like letting you add multiple items to your cart and even remember your login information.
Uses of Web Cookies
There are different ways that a website can use web cookies. They typically fall into:
User experience
Sites you visit use first-party cookies to enhance your experience and that of every visitor to their site.
When you visit a website with multiple languages and you choose Spanish, for example. The site creates cookies and uses it to remember your choice so that every time you come back, it remembers Spanish as the language you want to see the site in.
When you visit an ecommerce site, they use cookies to ensure that your experience adding items to your cart and checking out are seamless. If an ecommerce store didn’t use cookies, you will be unable to check out multiple items in one transaction.
Because a site may receive thousands to millions of visitors yearly, web cookies enable them to improve user experience for every visitor at scale.
Advertising and marketing
Third-party cookies play a huge role in online advertising and marketing.
Some advertisers use cookies that store information like age, gender and user behavior to serve internet visitors personalized ads. For example, knowing that you are a woman between the ages 25-34 means advertisers can show you ads about period apps, pregnancy products and others.
Another use in online digital marketing is retargeting. In this practice, advertisers use third-party cookies to target you with ads for a product/service you saw earlier. For example, you visit a university’s website about a postgraduate degree. Seeing ads about that University’s postgraduate programmes on every website you visit is a form of retargeting.
Analytics and web optimization
Web cookies are important in web optimization and analytics measuring.
In A/B testing, your experimentation tool uses first-party cookies to group your visitor into buckets for the different variations of your tests. It ensures visitors who see your control will not see the new variation. This helps prevent contamination in your experiments. These cookies typically only last for 30 days.
Another area of web optimization where web cookies are used is personalization. When you are customizing experiences for different audience segments, cookies allow you to personalize at scale.
For example, cookies can tell you the geolocation of your site visitors. Using this information, you can automatically change the language of your site to the one spoken where the visitor is. Knowing that a visitor is accessing your site from Mexico, your site can automatically switch its language to Spanish.
Analytics tools use cookies to measure:
- How many people come to your website.
- How visitors interact with different pages on your site.
- How long web visitors spend on a page and more.
Benefits and concerns of web cookies
The main benefit to using web cookies is improving user experience.
Optimizing your website for better user experience increases your revenue. Finding issues and solving them keeps visitors on your site for longer, helps them solve issues and make purchases without hassle.
All of this would not be possible without cookies to analyze user behavior on your site. Nor will it be possible without cookies in your optimization tool that ensures that a visitor who sees version A of an experiment doesn’t see version B.
Like everything else, there are risks associated with web cookies. The two biggest risks are an invasion of your privacy and cookie fraud.
The ubiquity of third-party cookies from advertisers and the data they store make them a threat to your privacy.
