Super cookies – the panacea for ROI?

I’ve been frustrated for a while by the ‘last click wins’ method of attributing a sale.  We know customers are only increasing the number of touch points they have with a brand yet we are still rewarding only the last click. It’s the equivalent of only paying a striker in your football team.

Super cookies, permanent cookies that stay on a user’s machine allow for a user’s journey to be tracked and therefore revenue to be attributed correctly across channel’s or across keywords.

ConversionWorks have already integrated this concept into Google Analytics and seem to be using it to good effect.

Theoretically this could be tied in with offline data about that user to really gain insight in to consumer behaviour. And, for me, this is where potential problems arise. There is a difference between using data on an anonymous basis to correctly attribute revenue recognition and being able to see the specific shopping habits of every single customer.

The use of cookies is being looked into in both the US and Europe, hopefully everyone will see sense and realise that the internet experience as we know it is largely reliant on cookies and getting rid of them would create a much less efficient market. But perhaps something does need to be done to protect anonymity on the internet.

Apart from privacy issues, the data will never be 100% accurate due to clearing of cookies, increasing use of multiple machines i.e. smartphones, work and home PCs. However, this is a potential solution to one of the fundamental problems in internet marketing at the moment and I can’t wait to try it out.

K