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Cookies: An Internet Marketer’s Treat
From ADV Magazine and ADVMag.com
By Timothy J. Hantula
Your customers’ computers have been munching on a steady diet of cookies for the past couple of years. So, what are these cyber goodies and what makes them so irresistible?
Web cookies are small text files that can be written into a web site program. Web sites then send cookies to every visiting computer’s hard drive, where they are stored. Cookies can help marketers generate leads, build image, service customers, and sell products on the web by adding functionality, simplicity and personality to their web sites.
Contrary to popular belief, a cookie isn't a program. It isn't a virus. It isn't an executable file at all. It's more like a note secretly passed between the computer and the web site it’s visiting, making it easier for repeat visitors to interact with your web site. Best of all, they’re totally invisible to the visitor.
Making it easier for visitors to use your site
Buying. One of cookies’ biggest marketing advantages is that they can make buying products and ordering information or product samples from a company’s web site easy. You may have already seen cookies in action in the form of shopping carts. Cookies can function as shopping carts, allowing visitors to purchase or order many items from a web site all at once rather than purchase or order each item separately, saving visitors time and making it easy to buy more.
Visiting. Cookies can make revisiting a site easier, encouraging repeat visitors and more site traffic. For example, if a site is password-protected, cookies can store visitors’ passwords on their own computers. In subsequent visits, the cookie enters the password for the visitor, saving the visitor time and effort, while still protecting the site from unauthorized (or unregistered) eyes.
Navigating. Cookies can enable web sites to be personalized to reflect visitors’ interests. Material that different visitors have historically been more interested in (according to the cookie) can be moved to the front of the site so that visitors don’t have to wade through the stuff they’re not interested in. And, by "remembering" personal information visitors have supplied in previous visits, cookies allow companies to customize their sites, welcoming visitors within a personalized interface. If a repeat visitor returns to your site, for example, the visitor can be greeted with a message like this, "Hi John. The last time you were here was on Thursday, June 11th. You went right to NEWS. We have updated our NEWS page, so would you like to go there again now"?
Making it easier for you to track your visitors
Cookies can help marketers’ evaluate the effectiveness of their sites by gathering demographic information about visitors and tracking their movements from page to page within the site. This tracking capability is what Netscape® refers to as "maintaining user states" across HTTP connections. Advertisers can also use cookies to build an Internet advertising database. Cookies allow advertisers to track Internet activity of particular computers, including the sites visited and the kinds of products or services that the computer's owner might be interested in. Advertisers can then precisely target their web advertisements.
Even without a white creamy center, web cookies seem to be the ideal treat for Internet marketers…so what’s the catch? The ability to gather so much information about site visitors, often without their knowledge, is perceived by some industry spokespersons as a violation of user privacy. However, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Computer Incident Advisory Capability Board says that, "privacy advocates’ fears over the use of cookies are unfounded." (TechWeb, 16 Mar 98)
Privacy issues aside, cookies are harmless. They cannot enable the web server to read from other files or cookies on your hard drive; they can't reveal your e-mail address against your will; they can't destroy data on your computer; and they can't give your computer a virus. Cookies only contain as much information about a visitor as the visitor discloses on the site that sets the cookie.
So, is it worth the cost?
Is your cookie going to endear more people than it's going to enrage?
Consider your site's audience. ADV’s web site audience, for example, probably doesn’t fall into the "cookies-invade-my-privacy" crowd. The audience for the Michigan Militia Site, however, may be a little more twitchy about the subject.
Content is still King. If you spend $3,000 for a cookie that merely puts a line of text across the top of your site saying, "Hello, (insert name here)"; it's probably not worth it. That kind of trick isn't going to encourage repeat visitors or demonstrate a company’s dedication to its customers. But, if you re-engineer your site with the goal of making it easier to navigate and demonstrating a true customer-service orientation, then it would be $3,000 well-spent. In fact, you'd have earned yourself a cookie.
© 1998 Timothy J. Hantula, All rights reserved. Schubert Communications
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