NEW YORK Internet users are taking back control of their computers, and online marketers and publishers are not pleased. But they do not quite know what to do about their conundrum - if it is a conundrum, since they cannot even agree on that.
Until recently, Internet businesses could track their users freely, using so-called cookies, tiny text files they secretly embed on the surfer's hard drive. Now, with the proliferation of antispyware programs that can delete unwanted cookies, they often cannot tell who has been to their Web site or what they have seen. And this erosion of control over a tool for gaining insight into consumer behavior has many of them fretting.
"Cookies are critical from a business perspective," said Lorraine Ross, vice president of sales at USAToday.com. "They help us do things like track our profitability per unique visitor, for instance. But if you don't know how many people are coming in, you don't really have a handle on whether your profitability is improving or not."
This anticookie fervor also hurts the deleters, she says. For example, cookies help a computer limit how many times the user is exposed to annoying ads like a floating, animated message. Such "frequency caps," to use industry parlance, are common among publishers. "So cookies are a really good thing for managing the user's experience," she said.
Last year, though, Ross said executives within USAToday.com, which is owned by Gannett, debated how effective their frequency caps were, since a growing number of Internet users were deleting cookies and possibly seeing a surfeit of animated ads.
Ross pointed out that like most established companies, USAToday.com does not use its cookies to identify its users. "But the user's paranoia is understandable, given the history," she said.
No kidding. Cookies first got a bad name in 1999, when DoubleClick, the Web advertising company, announced that it would use them to identify Internet users and analyze both their offline purchasing patterns and online surfing habits for the stated purpose of showing them more relevant online ads. That plan died a loud, painful death after privacy advocates caught wind of it, and marketers and publishers have taken a much more cautious approach ever since.
Even so, privacy advocates deplore cookies and, as antispyware programs like Webroot Spy Sweeper and McAfee Anti-Spyware have come on the market, surfers by the millions are apparently knocking them out of service as fast as they can be installed. This spring, the online consulting firm Jupiter Research published a report saying that 39 percent of Internet users it surveyed had regularly erased cookies.
"I don't think cookies should be out there at all, but the good news here is that consumers are at least becoming more sophisticated about the appropriate use of cookies," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group in Washington.
Eric Peterson, the analyst who wrote the Jupiter report, pointed out that most of those deleted tracking applications were so-called "third-party" cookies that are placed on the computer by a company other than the site the user visits. Most publishers rely on outside companies like DoubleClick to send ads to the user's computer and track the effectiveness of the campaign.
Antispyware programs often leave in place first-party cookies but remove third-party cookies, the main target of the users' ire. Some people, like Rotenberg, think that total anonymity is the way to go.
The threat to the bottom line is real. Peterson said cookies not only help sites measure overall profitability but are also critical in measuring the effectiveness of individual advertising campaigns. Marketers, for instance, could conceivably pay a Web site to deliver ads to 100,000 people but only reach about 60,000 because so many of them were being counted twice.
"If you're O.K. with getting your ads to half as many people, and not really being sure how effective your campaign was, well, then you can happily put your head in the sand," Peterson said. "Most people tell us they want data more accurate than that."
But are that many people really blocking cookies? Some executives are not so sure.
"When I talk to publishers, nobody says the problem is as big as the press suggests," said Greg Stuart, chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry trade group. "So our role should be to get to some factual basis." Stuart said his organization is in the midst of planning its own research into the issue, because, he said, much of the recent research "involves asking consumers about what they did, which isn't always a good indicator of their behavior."
Another doubter is Peter Naylor, the senior vice president of sales for iVillage, a network of women's sites. "I don't think the problem is real, based on what we're seeing, or more importantly not seeing," he said.
Naylor said he has not conducted tests or surveys to determine if his company's visitors were deleting or blocking cookies, "but nothing has changed dramatically enough to raise a red flag. And I've heard literally nothing about it from advertisers."
Among those companies fielding the most calls about cookie deletion are advertising technology businesses like Atlas, an online market research company. Young-Bean Song, the director of analytics for Atlas, said that even if the cookie deletion rates were as high as 40 percent, publishers and marketers could still rely on the data from the other 60 percent of the site's users to gauge the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns and other important statistics.
Perhaps because executives cannot agree on the scope of the problem, solutions have been slow to emerge. Stuart, from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, said that if the issue turns out to be as big as some suspect, his organization would likely embark on an advertising campaign to convince online users that cookies are not harmful.
Ross, the USAToday.com vice president, says the real solution is to overcome consumer hostility to what she regards as a legitimate business practice that makes life easier for everybody.
"We have to think about long-term answers," she said. "We need to have users love their cookies, for the right reasons."
No comments:
Post a Comment