First-party cookies vs cookieless: what changes for attribution

A first-party cookie is set on your own domain and only sent back to your own domain. It's different from the third-party cookies that ad networks used to follow people across unrelated sites, which browsers have been restricting for years.

Trakily's default script sets two:

• _trakily_vid: a random visitor id, when that visitor was first seen and how many visits they've made. Kept for a year.
• _trakily_sid: a random session id, which expires after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Neither contains a name, email or anything from another site.

Without a cookie, there's nowhere to remember a visitor. Trakily's cookieless script, like other cookieless tools, has the server compute an anonymous id from a hash of a secret salt, the site, the IP address and the user agent. The salt changes every day, so the same person gets a new id each day. That's the privacy benefit: nobody can follow them from one day to the next. It's also the cost.

Buying decisions often take more than a day. When the visitor id resets daily, a purchase on a later day can't be connected to the first visit.

• Keep cookies if revenue attribution is a main reason you use analytics, especially if people usually think for a few days before buying. List the cookies in your cookie notice.
• Go cookieless if avoiding cookies matters more to you than multi-day attribution, or most of your purchases happen in the same visit.

Whether you need consent for either depends on where you and your visitors are and how you use the data; get advice for your situation rather than relying on a vendor's label. Our cookie policy lists exactly what Trakily stores, and the docs show how to switch modes.