How does MXO use Cookies?
MXO provides a technology solution that enables your organization to collect, and sometimes store, data about your customers. While MXO enables the collection and storage of customer data, that data remains the property of your organization.
MXO uses cookies to facilitate the collection of customer information for your organization, such as the devices they use, the products and services they interact with, and the ways in which they interact, for example, the website pages they visit and the online forms they complete. Any customer information your organization collects is held pseudo-anonymously in MXO . No information, other than an pseudo-anonymous identifier, is held in the cookies themselves.
What sort of information can my organization collect?
The information your organization can collect and use includes:
- Personal information. By default, MXO does not store any personally identifiable information (PII) about a customer, entered through a browser, during an interaction. Your organization controls which fields are tracked and can choose to capture more information, if necessary.
- Behavioral information. Information including any website pages visited, search queries entered, and preferences identified. For example, information provided within a form such as your current motor insurance provider or the expiry date of your existing motor insurance policy.
- Device information. Device-specific information, including hardware model, operating system version and unique device identifiers for a customer's device.
- Location information. Information about a customer's actual location, using data such as the IP address of a customer's browser or GPS coordinates sent by a customer's mobile device.
The information collected may be used to build customer profiles that help your organization deliver a more tailored and relevant customer experience. The customer profile itself is pseudo-anonymous and contains no personally identifiable information about an individual customer.
What types of cookies does MXO use to collect customer information?
MXO uses both first-party and third-party cookies to collect customer information.
First-party cookies
First-party cookies are created either by a website's server or by javascript executed in a web page. Although the MXO Tag is served from MXO , it executes in the web page of a site and the cookies it creates are classified as first-party cookies. This prevents those cookies from being blocked.
MXO creates the one__randomid first-party cookie.
The MXO Tag reads the values present in the one__randomid cookie and sends those values to MXO as parameters. In response, MXO sends back either the same TID or an updated TID value which the MXO Tag uses to create or update those cookies.
The MXO Tag attaches the first-party cookie to the broadest top-level private domain of the site, the host domain. For example, if the website is www.site.com, cookies are stored against .site.com. This allows the MXO Tag to read the cookies over multiple sub-domains such as secure.site.com, login.site.com, and site.com.
Third-party cookies
Third-party cookies are set by web servers delivering content such as images, scripts, and ajax-loaded data into a page rather than actual page markup. For example, MXO would be classed as a third-party server for a page delivered by www.site.com. Third-party cookies cannot be read by a page, but are passed back and forth between MXO and the browser automatically.
MXO creates the one_svr__randomid third-party cookie.
The one_svr__randomid cookie contains a TID value. This value usually matches the value stored in the first-party cookie.
If allowed by the browser and any browser extensions, MXO sends and receives the one_svr__randomid, using it as the most reliable indicator of a customer's identity.
The one_svr__randomid cookie provides the most reliable TID value because it:
- is directly controlled by the MXO server,
- exists only once in the browser, and
- is common across all sites, regardless of domain.
How many cookies are stored for a customer?
MXO creates two cookies to allow you track customer activity:
- the one__randomid and
- the one_svr__randomid cookies.
These cookies are specific to a single Space (the randomid associates the cookies with an individual Space). If you have multiple production Spaces in your environment two cookies are stored in the customer's browser for each Space.
What happens if third-party cookies are blocked?
If third-party tracking cookies are blocked by the browser, the one_svr__randomid cookie is not available to MXO , and MXO falls back to using the first-party cookie.
The first party, one__randomid cookie, can successfully track the user across all sub-domains of a site, but cannot automatically transfer the customer's TID to other sites setup as Touchpoints in the Space. In this instance, different TID’s are created and stored for each site and linked together using the customer key.
Why does MXO use both first and third-party cookies?
MXO uses both first and third-party cookies to increase the accuracy of our tracking. The first-party cookie provides the most accurate way to track customers within the same domain and is the most widely supported and permitted method of tracking on a given site. MXO uses a third-party cookie, when permitted by the browser, to increase the reliability of tracking the same customer across multiple sites that do not share a common top-level private domain, for example, site.co.uk. It is not uncommon for an organizations multiple brands, marketing sites, and other web properties to use different domains and using a third-party cookie allows MXO to recognize the customer as the same person across all of these.
When testing, why does MXO continue to track me when I clear the cookies for a specific site?
If you clear your cookies for a site using a tool such as the EditThisCookie extension in Google Chrome, this clears only the cookies for the site you are currently on. The third-party cookie from your browser, associated with the MXO server, remains. To guarantee all your tracking data is cleared from both your browser and the MXO server, during testing, use the Clear customer data functionality available on the Monitor page in MXO .
When testing, why do I end up with multiple cookies stored in my browser?
The cookies that MXO uses to track customer activity are specific to a single Space. If, as a business user, you are testing across multiple Spaces, you will see a pair of cookies for each Space stored in your browser.