This article describes how Tealium products implement cookies as an integral part of their technology solution. The information here will be helpful to prospective and existing customers of Tealium and to users that engage with companies that use Tealium products.
For information about how tealium.com uses cookies, read the Tealium Cookie Policy.
In this article:
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What are cookies?
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They contain small amounts of information about your visit to the site. Each cookie has an expiration date at which the browser will automatically delete the cookie. Session cookies expire when the browser is closed or after 30 minutes of inactivity. Cookies are used by nearly every website as a way to improve your browsing experience.
First-Party and Third-Party Cookies
First-party cookies come from the domain that a user visits. Third-party cookies are associated with a domain different than the one a user visits.
The Universal Tag (utag.js) used by iQ Tag Management sets first-party cookies with an expiration date of 1 year from the time of creation (or last update). Tealium AudienceStream also relies on this first-party cookie to track visitor activity across multiple sessions on the same site or app.
In addition, Tealium copies this first-party cookie value into a third-party cookie in the domain .tealiumiq.com with an expiration of 1 year from the time of creation (or last update). This cookie is used in the visitor stitching feature when a known secondary identifier is not available.
Learn more about visitor stiching and secondary identifiers.
The Tealium platform does not store any personally identifiable information (PII) in these system cookies.
How do Tealium products use cookies?
Tealium iQ Tag Management
Customers of Tealium iQ Tag Management have the Universal Tag (utag.js) running in their page code. This script sets a value to v_id within the first-party cookie utag_main that is used to uniquely and anonymously identify visitors. This allows multiple visitor browser sessions on the same domain to be associated to the same user. This cookie has a 1 year expiration from the last time it was updated.
In addition, a custom cookie might be configured in iQ Tag Management to track when a visitor has seen a pop-up message and prevent it from showing again or to track which products a visitor has added to their shopping cart so that the contents can be preserved when the visitor returns.
Additional bits of anonymous information stored in the Tealium cookie are: session page view count, session event count, session count, start of session indicator, timestamp, and session ID.
Additional reading:
Tealium EventStream and AudienceStream
Customers of Tealium EventStream and AudienceStream use Tealium Collect to send data from their sites and apps to our customer data platform for processing. These data collection requests rely on the first-party cookie, utag_main_v_id , but might also use a third-party cookie named TAPID . In most cases the TAPID cookie is identical to utag_main_v_id and is unique to the visitor and the Tealium account. Either cookie can be used as a primary identifier when collecting visitor data.
What happens if users disable third-party cookies?
A user that has disabled third-party cookies will not receive the Tealium TAPID cookie, but will continue to receive the first-party cookie, utag_main_vid. In most cases, Tealium AudienceStream will function normally without the third-party cookie, especially if you follow our best practice of using first-party data such as a hashed email address or system ID to identify visitors.
In the case of cross-domain tracking, the missing third-party cookie will result in the inability to identify the same anonymous visitor across different domains.
Learn more about visitor stiching in Tealium AudienceStream.
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