What are cookies and how does CANDDi use them?

What is a cookie?

Unfortunately, I’m not talking about the chocolate kind. Digital cookies, also known as HTTP cookies, are small amounts of text that are lodged into a website browser as a way of collecting and remembering information about visitors and their browsing history.

Now that you’ve got CANDDi tracking software up and running on your website, you’ll know the valuable insight the use of cookies can provide. But it’s important to know where this data really came from. Cookies can work in two ways, they either store 3rd party data, or 1st party data.

What’s the difference?

3rd party data has long been at the centre of controversy for its ability to collect information on visitors from a domain other than the one currently being viewed. This has raised numerous questions about privacy policy and compliance with GDPR for companies, with many pulling the plug on 3rd party cookies completely.

However, 1st party cookies are stored by the website directly. They’re considered more user-friendly as they only allow website owners to view analytics and remember certain data for an enhanced user experience.

How does CANDDi use cookies?

The good news is that here at CANDDi, we’ve only ever used first-party cookies. That’s because we’ve always believed there’s no need to unnecessarily trace people’s clicks and swipes all over the internet. Instead, we focus on gathering real, insightful data on the visitors of one website only, yours!

This allows you to monitor visitor session activity, profile website visitors, map visitors across multiple platforms and refine your sales & marketing targets, all without an intrusive violation of your viewers privacy! Win win.

But how does in work? In practice, CANDDi has always used its own tracking code which is installed directly onto your website. This includes two first-party cookies on a visitor’s machine and some _ CAN_Store_xxx _ cookies.

I know that just looks like my dog has trampled all over my keyboard, but the _ CAN_Store_xxx _ cookies are temporary cookies which CANDDi uses to ensure that the data which has been captured is recorded and transmitted to the CANDDi servers. These cookies are deleted after a positive response is received from the CANDDi tracking servers. All of which complies with GDPR data protection.

Cookies and Google Analytics

If you are also using Google analytics, you can implement cookie-opt-in technology to configure this to call CANDDi’s API to record a visitor’s preferences.

If a customer explicitly opts out of being tracked, use the following javascript and CANDDi will stop tracking any data about this visitor:

if(window.canddi) { window.canddi.doNotTrack() }

If you need more help figuring out your cookies, drop us a line at help@canddi.com where one of our team will get back to you.