If you’re subject to GDPR, you’re required to display a banner and collect consent. Cookies are indispensable for technical reasons, but you can use only a few. We’ll share our tips to help you control your cookie usage. This is our product news of the day.
How do I know if my site uses cookies?
Your website’s functionality necessarily requires the use of cookies:
These storage files, such as saving language preferences, login data, and user shopping carts, are essential to the site’s operation.
You can enhance the experience with modules provided by third parties, such as audience measurement solutions, sharing buttons, and advertising spaces.
Fortunately, as we previously discussed, several methods exist to discover which cookies your site uses, such as browsers and third-party extensions.
Managing your cookies requires obtaining prior consent to place some of them. It would be best to allow users to refuse cookie placement. Therefore, you’ll need to rely on a solution that automatically manages these tasks: the Consent Management Platform.
This tool features a banner interface that displays the cookies and obtains the necessary authorizations from your visitors. Therefore, you should show that your site is built simply with technologies that benefit your audience.
Showcase sites: a minimum of cookies for maximum sobriety
Many websites are only showcase sites, featuring information pages about the brand, its product and service offerings, and a contact form.
With this type of support, you don’t need highly advanced features. Therefore, limit third-party functionalities to the bare minimum:
- Do you need to integrate page-sharing features on social media? Or is a simple link back to your Facebook/LinkedIn/Twitter page sufficient?
- Do you need to track your users’ browsing behavior to personalize your marketing communications?
Need advertising revenue? Avoid RTB
Do you want to monetize your audience with advertising? Excellent; what marketing technique do you plan to use?
Is a traditional advertising network sufficient for your needs?
Do you need to use real-time bidding (RTB)? RTB works by launching real-time auctions on the advertising space being visited by your users. If you use RTB, each bidder will deposit a cookie to win the bid when the publisher loads a page containing an advertising space.
This is why your site may suddenly start depositing 50, 90, or 100 cookies. Use less intrusive methods to monetize your ad spaces. These methods will require far fewer cookies.
Audience measurement, prefer tools/cookies exempt from consent
Under certain conditions, audience measurement solutions benefit from an exemption. The cookies concerned may be deposited without prior permission, but the user must still be able to block the deposit of these cookies later on.
The CNIL maintains a list of exempted tools on the market. For you, this is an excellent opportunity to abandon Google Analytics-type tools and search for more responsible alternatives:
- This audience measurement tool is linked to Google Ads. In many cases, a publisher using it for classic audience measurement would also collect data for advertising purposes.
- The tool is data-hungry and often oversized. Publishers only need high-level audience measurement. They will need to catch up on the details of the solution’s irrelevant indicators. It is better to prioritize more appropriate alternatives.
- Data is collected for your needs, but Google also uses it. Other providers are limited to a subcontractor role, where data is only collected for your account. This is a plus for your GDPR compliance.
- In the context of the post-Privacy Shield, using a solution provided by a US company is becoming a problem because the data is often collected and stored on their territory. After questioning the hosting of sites on a platform like Amazon Web Services, some regulators are now targeting Google Analytics. No one knows how to secure data transfers to the US from this tool, so why not change it?
Choose a CMP suitable for a limited number of cookies
If you visit the website of a major online media outlet, you may be a fan of the CMP installed on its site, its cookie banner.
But here’s the thing, you dig deeper and realize that the site in question is depositing 50, 100, or even 150 cookies. The chosen CMP handles this situation, including the use of RTB.
Axeptio has taken a different approach: chosen marketing. Our CMP is suitable for publishers who control the number of cookies deposited on their sites. Therefore, we do not recommend it to brands that choose to do RTB.
This positioning allows us to provide a solution to enhance the cookies deposited on your site. This is to show how useful they are for the user and make them more acceptable. Choosing Axeptio is an intelligent way to limit the number of cookies your site uses.
Conclusion: Limit cookies and optimize your GDPR compliance
As we can see, your site necessarily requires the use of cookies.
But you can control the number of cookies. Mainly by being restrained and not seduced by technologies requiring too many cookies. There are ways to offer a high-performance experience without multiplying these trackers.
To support this responsible approach, rely on a provider who advocates for organic marketing! A CMP designed to help a controlled number of cookies has only advantages:
- Technical constraints that will restrain the temptation for tracking tools to have a wow effect;
- A pedagogical and fun approach for maximum transparency;
- A well-designed UX to empower users.
And you? Are you ready to leap into organic marketing?
