Monday, May 23, 2005

Study: Triple the Number of Visitors Rejecting Third-Party Cookies

Users have apparently been adding insult (rejection) to injury (deletion) when it comes to the cookie-deletion controversy. The percentage of website visitors rejecting third-party cookies tripled last year, from roughly 4 percent in January to 12 percent in December and has hovered at that rate up to this month, according to WebTrends, MediaPost writes. The analytics company looked at records of some five billion visitor sessions per month on thousands of its clients' websites.

The WebTrends research showed that third-party rejections occurred most frequently in retail, with 16.7 percent of visitors declining third-party cookies; other high-rejection-rate categories are telecom (15.4 percent), healthcare (14.7 percent), manufacturing (13.3 percent), transportation (13 percent) and media (12 percent).

iMedia writes that WebTrends has launched version 7.5 of its analytics tool, which will better deal with the cookie-deletion controversy. The new features will allow the company, and publishers, to "bypass the third party cookies and leverage the first party cookies that the customers are already setting," according to a WebTrends spokesperson.

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