About third party cookies

The use of third party cookies for user identification industry is quickly declining. To compensate for the loss of third party cookies, the industry is shifting towards alternatives such as Universal IDs, e-mail based user IDs, or single sign on authentication. Another alternative is to leverage first party cookies for user identification, as described in this document.  

Leverage first party cookies 

How it works 

Publishers can leverage first party cookies as follows :

1. Create a new cookie stored on the publisher’s own domain (first party cookie) or re-use an existing cookie with a unique user ID.
2. Store a unique ID for each new user in this cookie. The user ID must be strictly unique to the given user.
3. Send the user ID in the ad request to Equativ.

Benefits

Features that function with first party cookies for user identification include: frequency capping, unique visitor reporting, or audience targeting.

For audience targeting to function, the audience data provider must use the same user IDs as the ones stored in first party cookies.

Audience targeting based on third party data is not compatible with user IDs from first party cookies as it relies on third party cookies.

Limitations

The following limitations apply when first party cookies are used for user identification:

• The user ID can be set for a single domain only. Publishers with multiple domains cannot leverage first party cookies across multiple domains.
• Data providers syncing segments with Equativ must use the same user IDs as the ones stored in the first party cookie.

Send user IDs from first party cookies

Send user IDs in smart.js integrations

A smart.js integration is a client side integration where Equativ ad tags are integrated in the website and trigger the ad request. You can pass the user ID using the parameter uid. For more information, see “Setting up the ad manager” in the article Tagging guide: get started.

Example

sas.cmd.push(function () {
     sas.setup(
       {
         uid: 123
           }
         );
   });

Send user IDs in Ad API integrations

An Ad API integration is typically a server side integration, where the ad request originates from another server. In this case, you can pass the user ID with the uid parameter. For more information about this parameter, see POST Ad API integration: parameter reference.

Example

{
    "networkId": 458,
    ...
    "ads": [
        {
            "formatId": 84313,
            ...
        }
    ],
    "uid": 123,
    ...
}