Tealium's UDH 3rd party cookie - is there a parameter for when it cannot be set?

[loldenburg]

We want to track how many users do not allow setting 3rd-party cookies. 

Tealium or at least Tealium Universal Data Hub (Tealium Collect) uses a 3rd-party cookie in addition to the first-party utag_main Cookie. Is there any parameter / JavaScript variable being set if that 3rd-party cookie cannot be set? Then we could use that as an indicator for 3rd-party cookies not being enabled.

[mitchellt]

Hello - I don't know if there's a built-in variable which provides the flag you want, but it seems you could create one yourself.  Try and set a cookie value, then retrieve it immediately following. If the value returned is null, then you have your answer and can take further action.

I hope this helps you along...  please keep us posted!

[loldenburg]

I think that won't work, you cannot set third-party cookies via JavaScript unless you can ping some server. For First-Party Cookies, yes, that's the standard way of checking if non-HTTP First-Party cookies can be set.

[craig_rouse]

@loldenburg In the UDH, there's an attribute called "tealium_thirdparty_visitor_id". This will only be set for those users who have 3rd party cookies enabled. You can therefore setup a rule in UDH to say "tealium_thirdparty_visitor_id is not assigned", which will give a good indication as to which visitors have 3rd party cookies disabled. You could then assign a badge (or other attribute of your choice) to this user. I tested this in my own browser by disabling 3rd party cookies and running a Live Events session to see all incoming traffic matching the "tealium_thirdparty_visitor_id is not assigned" rule, and it worked well. Of course, you could make this attribute available through Data Layer Enrichment, which would give you access to it client-side as well as server-side if you needed it.

Give it a try and let me know how you get on :-)

I'm pretty confident it will suit your requirements, but I may have missed something.

[loldenburg]

That's a good one, @craig_rouse, thanks.

[mitchellt]

@loldenburg you're right, I was thinking about the ability to set cookies, period.  Thankfully, @craig_rouse has the solution!   Thanks all, for the learning opportunity! :)

[craig_rouse]

You're welcome @loldenburg. To close the loop, it would be interesting to hear back from you once you've implemented this, to see if you're getting good data from it.

1 thing I forgot to mention: You could probably use a couple of different attributes for this - one at the visit level, and one at the visitor level, as they would tell different stories. You'd probably want to base any connectors from the "In audience at end of visit" trigger, just to account for any edge cases (there may not be any) where the user doesn't immediately get 3rd party visitor ID, but does end up with one at the end of the session.

Just some ideas, and I haven't set this all up for myself, so I'll leave you to play around with it and report back what works best.

[craig_rouse]

@loldenburg I was just wondering if you managed to get this set up yet, and if you're getting some good data from it? Do you have any interesting use cases to share?

[loldenburg]

still in dev, will let you know when we have some insights

[craig_rouse]

@loldenburg Thanks for the update!

[loldenburg]

@craig_rouse Ok we have now implemented it with @maciekstanasiuk. It looks like it is working. Yesterday, the data looked fishy, but that was due to what seems like an incidence in the Universal Data Hub infrastructure (Data Layer Enrichment was malfunctioning during most of the day).

Today it looks better, and if you look at the second table, you see what we would expect: Most Safari browsers do not accept third-party cookies, in other browsers that percentage is almost negligible (which surprises me a bit, so I hope what Tealium's flag represents is really acceptance of 3rd party cookies). Still, for us in Switzerland, Safari is about 60% of the traffic, so third-party cookies are a no-go for tracking.

[craig_rouse]

Great feedback @loldenburg! Thanks for sharing.