Did you ever wish if you could understand the preferences and interests of your target customers so you could refine your strategies and improve your business?
Well, the internet and web technologies offer unlimited opportunities to track people and store data about them. You can use it to your advantage.
The best way to understand the preferences and interests of your users is by using cookies. It’s not the one you would eat with milk. This is website cookies. It gives you immense possibilities to store the interests, online history and behaviour. You can use this information to provide messages to the users tailored to their personality.
What is a cookie?
A cookie is a small file in the local computer of a user which is dropped by a website during the first visit. This file collects information about the interactions of the user with the website. This data can be used to dynamically present relevant contents when the user visits that website again. The relevancy is decided based on previous interactions.
Types of cookies
Session Cookies: Cookies that collect data about the activities performed by a user during a single session. A session cookie is deleted at the end of the session, so the data is not stored for future visits.
Persistent Cookies: The data on the cookie is stored in the computer of the user, and it is used during the future visits. This kind of cookies has an expiry date set to it, so it is expired after a date in the future. The users can also delete the cookies if they want. Apart from that, browsers will automatically delete cookies when the browser is closed if it is in the incognito mode.
Third-party Cookies: When users visit a website, the website may also set persistent cookies on behalf of other websites. The first website requests a small file from the third-party websites so the first website can set cookies for the other websites.
How does a cookie work?
All you need to do is a drop a tag which is a snippet of code on your website. This tag will drop cookies on to the browsers of your website visitors, so their online behaviour can be tracked. Google Remarketing Tag is one of the popular tools to add tags to the websites.
The cookie in the browser gives a unique identification number and begins to collect data from the activities in a browser. Remember, a cookie doesn’t collect any personal details like name, address, or email ids. They only collect the information about the websites and web pages a user visits.
As far as a business is concerned, this data is highly valuable because it helps businesses to understand the preferences of their prospects.
What can cookies do for you?
Cookies help website owners to understand the preferences of their website visitors and serve content accordingly.
One of the popular usages of the cookie during its initial stages was saving the preferred language of website visitors. Websites with multiple languages used cookies to store the preferred language of a visitor in a small document among the visitor’s browser file and use this information to serve the content later when the user open that particular website again.
Here is an example of this:
You have visited www.xyz.com which is a blog on travel supporting English, (Española) Spanish and French languages. The default language of the blog is in English, but you want to use the French version of the website.
When you open the www.xyx.com blog for the first time, the default language was in English. You have the option to choose French or Spanish if you want and you choose the French version and begin to read.
When you open the blog again in the future, the French version may automatically load in your browser. The website has dropped a cookie in your browser during your first visit and stored your preferred language. When you access the website again, the website looks for the cookie in your browser, and if it finds the cookie, it reads it and uses the data to serve the content based on that.
Remember, the cookies are stored in the computers of the users so a user can delete the cookie if they want.
There might be hundreds of cookies in a computer dropped by different websites, but a website can only access the cookie that it has dropped on to the website.
Benefits of using cookies
A cookie can store many different kinds of information about the browsing or online behaviour of your website visitors. All you need to do is drop the cookie file on to the browser of the users, and it will automatically collect the data for you.
The cookie can contain:
- The time the visitor visited your website
- The items the visitor added to their shopping cart
- The links the user clicked on your website
Now you have learned we can store a variety of data from a user can be stored. Now we can look into how this data can be used for our advantage.
How to utilize cookie
There are many different ways you can utilize the data you have collected through the cookies. You can dynamically generate content on your web pages depending on the data from the cookies associated with a user.
Product recommendations
In e-commerce websites, you can create a section for the recommended products where you can dynamically list items based on the previous purchase history, product searches in the website and the items in the cart.
Article/content suggestion
The same principle can also be used in news websites and blogs. The websites can suggest new more stories or articles based on the interest of the user.
Show relevant ads
You can use the cookies to show relevant ads or modal pop-ups to the users based on their interest. This will help you to increase the click-through rate of your ads and pop-ups and improve conversion rate.
Examples for the practical use cookies
OptinMonster
Show Different Email Opt-in Forms for New and Returning Visitors.
Sometimes, you may want to show different email opt-in forms to your visitors depending on if the visitor is a new or returning visitor.
You can do that only with the help of a cookie. It will help you to identify if the visitor is new or not. You don’t have to worry about setting up the cookies and displaying the opt-ins based on that because it can be easily done using OptinMonster.
Facebook pixel
Facebook pixel is a shortcode that you can put on your website so you can keep track of the conversions from Facebook ads and remarket your Facebook ads to the users who have already taken some actions on your website.
The remarketing allows you to target your Facebook ads to people who have already visited your websites. So, they are more likely to respond to your ads because they have already expressed interest in you.
Apart from that, Facebook Pixel will also help us to create a lookalike audience who are similar to the users who have already visited your website.
How to add the code for creating cookies on a WordPress website
You can set up cookies and track users quickly on WordPress websites compared to websites built on other CMS platforms. When it comes to pure HTML or PHP website, setting up the cookies is a time-consuming process.
So, we will discuss how to set up cookies on WordPress websites.
There are two different ways you can set up the tracking code on WordPress websites. The first method is pasting the tracking code on to the WordPress files directly. The second method is the easiest way of adding the code on to the website using plugins.
Manually add tracking code
Depending on the tracking code, the place to paste the code may be the header, footer or body of the web pages.
You can access the required file on your WordPress dashboard by going to Appearance menu and the Editor sub-menu.
There you can see a section called Theme Files on the right side where you can find the required file to add the tracking code.
You need to be very careful when you do it manually. It is always recommended to copy the existing code in the file and save it somewhere before you edit it the file. So you can use it if you make errors in the code and the website doesn’t work.
Add tracking code using plugins
The Tracking Code Manager plugin for the WordPress is the best way to add any tracking code on any WordPress files. It has an extremely user-friendly and intuitive UI to add the tracking code and choose on what kind pages and posts the code needs to be implemented.
Final words
Tracking your website visitors using a tracking code which will create cookies on the visitor’s website helps you serve personalized content to your website visitors. While this helps website visitors to get more relevant content, it also allows businesses to target prospective customers based on their interests, preferences and many other factors.
Adding the tracking code and keeping track of the users and taking actions based on that is not a difficult job at all. You can do it by yourself even if you don’t have the technical expertise in web development.
Author Bio:
Venkatesh is the Founder & Web developer at Spidergems, a web design and development company in India. His extensive knowledge in web technologies coupled with the expertise in digital marketing has made the company a reliable digital partner for business of all sizes across India.
