Best Practices for Conversion Tracking Without Third-Party Cookies

CAKE’s most commonly used tracking method to determine campaign performance and attribution relies on the cookies CAKE sets in the browser and the matching HTML pixels retrieving them in order to store conversions in the CAKE platform.

CAKE sets first-party and third-party cookies, however, both types of cookies are becoming more restricted with recent legislation regarding privacy.

Laws surrounding the internet and privacy are more prevalent than ever. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) affected how 3 of the worlds most used browsers treat or rather, block, first- and third-party tracking cookies:

Today, you may rely heavily on cookies to track conversions and dictate attribution, however cookie based tracking is becoming increasingly unreliable and is not a best practice. It’s difficult to accurately measure your campaigns if the browsers being used by consumers are blocking cookies. Now is the time to refocus your efforts. Here are a few approaches you can use in CAKE today to accurately measure campaign performance which don’t require third‑party cookies.

Most commonly known as “server‑to‑server tracking,” but also referred to as “postback tracking,” this approach requires an advanced marketing measurement platform that can assign a unique ID to an anonymous consumer’s interaction.

In place of a cookie, a click ID or session ID, (in CAKE known as the CAKE Request ID) can be stored server‑side, or in the advertiser’s first‑party cookie, until the point of conversion.

Since any measurement platform that supports this type of tracking will use its own unique IDs in place of cookies, it is an increasingly popular approach to meet both performance tracking and data privacy demands. Additionally, since server‑to‑server tracking does not rely on cookies which can be cleared by the consumer or blocked by customer browser settings, it’s a highly accurate approach for measuring performance.

This approach is a hybrid of cookie and cookieless tracking and utilizes the unique ID mentioned in option #1 and a JavaScript SDK (an HTML conversion pixel), instead of a Postback URL.

When used in conjunction with a click pixel, the JavaScript SDK (JSSDK) reads the unique session identifier that is set in the first‑party cookie by the click pixel and uses that value for the campaign attribution instead of the cookie.

Though this option is easier to implement than server‑to‑server tracking using Postback URLs, it still requires the use of a first‑party session cookie which is susceptible to browser restrictions. Also, note that it requires that you place a click pixel on the landing page of an offer in addition to the conversion pixel (JSSDK) on the thank‑you page.

While first‑party cookies and cookieless tracking can accurately measure performance the majority of the time, fingerprint tracking can be a useful tool to supplement those efforts. It

If you have any questions, please reach out to your dedicated CAKE Client Success Manager/Account Manager or contact the CAKE Support Team at support@getCAKE.com.