1st party cookie – to fret, or not to fret

More and more browsers – including Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox – prevent the setting of cookies by third-party domain requests, and in the near future, third-party advertising cookies will probably not be support at all.

Therefore, it is the highest time for advertising technology platforms to go beyond the traditional philosophy of cookie-based identifiers and adapt accordingly.

Marketing technologies should adopt 1st party ad serving solution that delivers advertising without third-party cookies, using javascript-based 1st party tags to create 1st party cookies.

Implementing tracking using first-party cookies may allow you to track visitors more successfully than using third-party cookies.

• They are blocked less often.
• Many anti-spyware applications and privacy settings do not target first-party cookies.

In a first-party cookie implementation, the domain of the cookie placed in the browser is the same as the domain being visited. For example, if you visit example.com and the domain of the cookie placed on your computer is example.com, then this is a first-party cookie. If it the domain of the cookie is different than example.com, this is a third-party cookie.

This solution is more and more popular and is covered among others by the following technologies supported and delivered by Centraals:

Oracle Eloqua 1st party tracking – Eloqua provide 1st party cookie implementation, ensure your tracking domain has a CNAME record pointing towards Oracle Eloqua in the following syntax: s[SiteID].hs.eloqua.com.

Mautic is by default supporting 1st party cookie for every singe instance of the system.

Matomo Analytics: Matomo by default supports 1st party cookies. Aps are installed in a customer private subdomains to get even better accuracy of the tracking.

TC Affiliate platform is supporting by default 1st party cookie.

Infinity Analytics rely on 1^st-party cookies, that is the preferred method for tracking visitors in the whole Oracle Marketing Cloud. 

Worth to remember that first-party cookies cannot be shared across domains. So it is not possible to use a first-party cookie to track a single visitor’s across multiple domains owned by your organization.