Context
More and more web clients do not support or block 3rd party cookies. The result is, that one user browsing the website results in a series of events, that have the same domain_userid but a lot of different network_userids. For later processing the network_userid is completely useless and could be set to a fixed value like 00000000-0000-4000-A000-000000000000
to adhere to the UUID rules.
Why
It saves a lot of computation later in the process, because it cuts down the flood of useless network_userids, which will never be seen again.
How is it done?
Ususally the cookie bounce works like this: The collector takes the request, checks for the presence of the defined cookie name.
- If it is there: use it and process the request.
- If the cookie is missing, the collector issues a redirect to itself with an magic/uniq/special query parameter and the Set-Cookie header. Once the client follows the redirect, the collector checks for the presence of the cookie.
- If it is not presented by the client, it is obvious that 3rd party cookies do not work.
- In this case the network_userid can be set to the defined value and the request could be processed.
Implications
This behaviour results in a bit more traffic due to this additional redirect. We observed roughly 30%.
Ideally the value of the network_userid could be specified in the config. If nothing was specified, the collector would work, like it used to be.
See also
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