By Well done everyone on a strong November where many of our websites have broken records with one of the strongest months of online sales ever.
We have made a release yesterday to your website which includes a new GDPR pop-up. When a user comes onto your website, they are shown a pop-up message asking them to ACCEPT ALL COOKIES or MANAGE THEIR PREFERENCES. They are not allowed to use the website until they have made their selection. This is in accordance with EU GDPR regulations.
The pop-up waits 2 seconds before appearing to allow the user to ensure that they are on the correct website first.
Their choice is remembered for 3 months so they will not have the pop-up come up again for the next 3 months. Instead, each time they return to the website, they are offered the option to change their preferences with a cookies banner across the top of the website. They can CLOSE this banner for the rest of their session but the next time they go onto your website, the banner will reappear across the top again.
Other websites give the user options to turn on/off certain groups of cookies but our current approach is that users of the website should be able to simply turn off all 3rd party external cookies and use the site without being impacted. We took this approach for the following reasons and will review this again over time as we watch how this impacts analytics over the coming months:
Initial analytics from testing show that only approx 2-7% of users disable cookies.
The website can run perfectly without these cookies turned on – and in some cases, there is less clutter with 3rd party pop-ups not coming up, push notifications coming down, etc that the user experience can be more enjoyable. So we’ve taken a safe approach to not burden the user with lots of options and text to read but simply tell them the website will work perfectly without these cookies and give them one option to continue without them.
We have no control over external parties and how their scripts run so cant guarantee that a 3rd party which may be used for a specific service is not also recording analytics or other functionality – so we’ve taken a safe approach that they are turned off completely if the user is not comfortable with external cookies being used.
Impact on Google Analytics & Other Analytics
Note that when a user comes onto the site and sees the pop-up, we have disabled all cookies and external scripts including the integration with Google Analytics until they make their choice – so if they don’t click anything, their session will not appear at all in Google Analytics – and it is possible that the referral website may not be recorded too. So your analytics will be affected by this and may not be accurate.
Note that analytics are not 100% accurate anyway (e.g. as their scripts can be blocked by browsers) and should only be used as a guideline. And since the percentage of users disabling cookies seems to be below 10%, the impact on analytics should be minor.
Monitoring Impact on Analytics
You can view the percentage of users who have cookies disabled on your dashboard under the following heading:
We are concerned that some users may come to the website and not want to click ACCEPT ALL or MANAGE and then leave the website but this cookie popup has become standard across all eCommerce websites so we are hopeful that the impact will be minimal.
We also have kept the text to a minimum while other websites display pages of options which confuse the user – so we’ve taken the approach to tell them that the website will run perfectly without all these external cookies and give them one option in the hope that they will quickly make their decision and continue to the website.
Also, since we remember the user’s preferences for 3 months, returning users will not see the pop-up for the next 3 months which should reduce the impact on them.
To monitor the impact the cookie has on sales, watch the effect on CONVERSION RATE on your dashboard.
For more information read here.
AB Commerce blog 