How to Make Better Tasting Cookies
Increasing the acceptance rate for cookies is one of the major marketing goals: So, what kind of role does a good cookie banner play in this context?
Marketing cookies may no longer be used without the user’s express consent or opt-in. Yet without cookies, you cannot run analytics applications or identify target groups for suitable re-targeting measures. This makes it a plausible objective to increase the number of users who consent to the use of cookies. Efforts to boost the acceptance rate along these lines are also referred to as “opt-in optimisation.”
How Many Users Actually Consent to the Option in the Cookie Banner?
The answer to this question differs depending on the statistics you look at. But for most websites, an acceptance rate of 40 % to 50 % may be reasonably assumed. That being said, it has also been observed that optimising the design of the cookie banner may raise the rate as high as 65 %.
What Makes the Withheld Cookie Consent a Marketing Issue?
Recent years have seen the introduction of a growing number of online marketing measures that are based on cookies or comparable tracking technologies. The lower the acceptance rates for marketing cookies, the less meaningful are the measures that are based on the available database because the latter only maps a fraction of the actual users. In order to be able to use the data gathered through cookies legitimately for marketing purposes, it is of the essence to enhance and optimise the opt-in rate or acceptance rate. Aside from the legal opt-in requirement, there is another reason for obtaining users’ consent to the use of their personal data: You present yourself as trustworthy and as a peer-to-peer partner.
FROM A SIMPLE SHORT-BREAD TO A CREAM-FILLED DELIGHT
Helpful Examples – For a Great Cookie Banner, Consider the Following Tips and Recommendations:
- Position your cookie banner in the bottom right or left corner.
- Make your website contents directly accessible. An overlay that covers your homepage until the cookie box has been clicked will cause irritation among visitors more so than improved interaction.
- Do not use a banner that run across the entire width of the screen, but use a square format that is easier to grasp.
- Adapt the cookie banner to your corporate identity by including your logo, and ask users directly and in a welcoming way for their consent.
- Don’t be too pushy in your attempt to persuade users to grant their consent. Try to build trust, and do not hide anything. Engage your target groups at eye level. After all, peer-to-peer interaction is what you are aiming for.
Cookies to Be Managed By Data Trustees
Can this be the longed-for solution? Hope for an end to the cookie dilemma now rests on so-called “Personal Information Management Systems” or PIMS for short. Under this concept, users state their preferences just once vis-à-vis a neutral third party that acts as data trustee and mediator in the interaction with any given website.
Consumer rights advocates principally seek options to reject the use of any cookie, if possible, whereas businesses want the exact opposite. Maximilian von Grafenstein, a professor for „digital self-determination” at the Einstein Center Digital Future and at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), had this to say about the concept: “I think it is the only functional compromise that could keep the great idea behind PIMS from becoming a flop.”
The ground for the PIMS concept was laid with the Telecommunications-Telemedia Data Protection Act (TTDSG), which came into force last December. It sets out the rules governing the “recognised consent management services,” among other things. Data protection rights specialist Rolf Schwartmann therefore called the new TTDSG act a “law against cookie terror.” But the law is a long time coming.