Third-Party tracking is a practice by which trackers (mostly invisible) installed by a particular website collect data from the users of that website. It is a simplified method of monitoring conversions received by affiliate software that further automatically sends notifications to tracking systems.
Third-Party cookies is a widely employed tool in this kind of tracking which is used for targeting, retargeting, banner ad setup, and behavioral marketing by almost all Martech and Adtech platforms. In addition to that, many other instruments are exploited for tracking and identifying a user, such as browser fingerprinting, tracking beacons (or web bugs), Geofencing, HTML storage, IP targeting, and even more technologies.
Third-Party software can be either single-website or multi-website trackers. While the first kind is considered to be more secure as it keeps the data of each user isolated, the latter is more dangerous for privacy as it shares information about users’ behavior across many unrelated sites.
Nevertheless, one of the major concerns for advertisers is the rise in popularity of ad blockers and other third-party tracking blocking methods. It is worth considering that Third-party cookies are blocked when a user performs one or more of the following actions:
- Uses the browser in private mode
- Employs Safari as a web browser on Apple mobile devices (third-party cookies are blocked by default in Safari iOS).
- Uses Tor (The Onion Router)
- Installs ad-blockers
