When entering a website you are asked to “accept cookies” and this term has become increasingly calm over the last years, but why do websites want us to accept them and how these affect First and Third Party Data. Part of the job of being an Account Manager for an E-commerce email marketing agency, is to be on top of what can influence a customer making a purchase, in this case we’ll understand what cookies are and how they are involved with the data collected from a website.

At the beginning of the internet, cookies were much easier to understand as small packages of information sent to help run a program on the computer. This term has evolved and now cookies are seen as trackers used to connect users and websites with a combination of an ID card and a digital post-it note downloaded as small text files to the user’s device in order to remember the user’s choices  and activities. The importance of cookies is connected to almost everything people do on the internet, from remembering login credentials and  adding to cart items when shopping, to creating target ads for companies.

There are different types of data to be collected, in this article first and third party data will be analyzed, but click here to learn about Data-Driven Email Marketing: 4 types of data that will power up your email marketing strategy.

The level of interaction changes depending on the data collected, for first-party data cookies are created by the host domain of the website visited. Even though these cookies can contain sensitive information like information entered on the website and maybe the IP address of the user, it’s seen as an agreement between the user and the website to help things run better. Examples of first-party cookies include a greeter, a shopping basket, and a personal shopper. On the other hand, third-party cookies are mostly created by advertising companies and not the websites themselves, which made them non-essential. Examples of third-party cookies include tracking, retargeting, and ad- serving.

First-party cookies connect you to a single website. They hold on to some personal information to make the website easier to use. Third-party cookies allow someone to track your shopping or other activity across the internet, and have been the cornerstone of online advertising for many years now, but their days seem to be numbered as the government and advertisers are increasingly fighting to block thor-party tracking and execute more privacy regulations such as the GDPR. But more effectively, creating awareness of the issues associated with privacy issues coming directly from these types of cookies.