As previously mentioned in my post Cookies Deadline Fast Approaching, the deadline has now been and gone!
So are you compliant?
As you trawl around the web you should start to see various pop up boxes, side bars, top/bottom banners all talking about Cookies – and you should get the option to accept.
So what does this mean?
The User
Basically now you are given the option of whether you would like to accept a cookie onto your machine – if you don’t this might cause some issues with how the site works and what experience to have.
The Website Owner
Not only do you have to edit your website to insert this piece of code – but also it could have quite a large impact on your business – how?
A few ways that cookies are used:
1. Remembers who you are and populates the username/password fields – to any site where you might buy online or log in to get updates or news articles – now you might have to remember those details yourself (not a bad this security wise!) but can be annoying for a customer and they might not want to come back!
2. Quite a few website place adverts based upon how to use the site – this again is run by cookies – so if the user doesn’t accept they will see adverts that are not related to them at all – again lost revenue from placed adverts
3. Annoying the customer! The biggest one that you want to avoid – the issue you have is that if someone says NO I don’t want to accept cookies – how does your system no they said no – it cannot remember that (without a cookie!) so it will constantly ask them again and again to accept cookies – annoying – and what happens to annoying customers – they leave! Potential lost revenue right there!
4. Statistics – all good business coaches will tell you to test and measure – most people use a Statistics program on their website that tracks
– number of visits
– what browsers was used
– what search engines was used
– what keywords were used to find the last
– what pages were looked at
– and sometimes what links were clicked (ie did that advert work)
If a user says “no” to cookies you lose that information!
So your stats suddenly are not as valid as they once were
What can you do about it?
I believe that as time goes on people will realise that these cookies are not a bad thing – and in fact can be a good thing and will start saying “yes” to cookies – and hopefully the EU legislation might realise that tracking cookies for stats are not a bad thing and maybe relax the guidelines somewhat!
Only time will tell!
