[thelist] targeting effectively

martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com
Mon Mar 25 11:21:01 CST 2002


Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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Hi Ben, Adrian

I *have* had a project this last year where we couldn't come up with a
better solution than cookies.

Problem 1 - for legal reasons, we need to ensure that all users have passed
a self-certification of age and country of residence before they can see
the site (it was an alcohol site, but this could have been true for a
number of sectors)

Problem 2 - the client insisted (and with good reason) that users should
only ever have to see the certification page once (with exceptions for
shared machines, web-cafes etc)

Problem 3 - for traffic generation purposes, we wanted to users to be able
to email deep links to their friends (and we provided tools to help with
this like 'Mail this page to a friend' and postcard functionalities)

Problem 4 - for technical strategy reasons, the client bought a packaged
solution for web content delivery, recognising that it would have
short-term weaknesses, but with long-term gains in support, plus they're
big enough to strongly influence the direction the solution goes in.
Unfortunately, this meant it would have been difficult to implement
session-tracking by URL before the next product release cycle.

So we went with a persistent cookie for verification purposes, plus a
session one to be able to evaluate the accuracy of the predicted user
journeys through the site and effectiveness of site features in encouraging
sales.

Cheers
Martin




Subject:    Re: [thelist] targeting effectively


On 11:27 PM 3/24/2002, aardvark said to me:
>and cookies have obvious exceptions, like allowing many shopping carts to
>work... but if i went to a site and couldn't navigate the pages without
>cookies,
>i'd be pretty disappointed...

Like Logitech's web site:

<http://www.logitech.com/>

I reject cookies out of instinct (because 99% of them are worthless for
me).  Logitech uses cookies to track language and region  and prevents me
from seeing anything without them.  Which, of course, drives me crazy if I
just want to find out stats on their optical mice.


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