The online market place in this day and age consists of three types of websites. Ones that just get left alone along without any kind of promotion, ones that get lucky and just happen to benefit online from the brand strength they have offline, and ones that actually focus on their online marketing and rely on online sales to succeed.
As an SEO consultant working for a UK, Manchester web design agency, the websites that we generally have to work with are the ones that rely on online business. Now in order for an online business to succeed in this modern competitive online marketplace, it needs to be able to measure, analyse and deliver. Just like in the real world, if you run a store then you want to be able to perform customer surveys to see what is happening in your store; where people are looking; what products catch their eyes; what products are in demand and simply supply it in places where your customers will be able to access them easily. The same goes for online businesses however, the information that you can capture about your customers is far more powerful than in the real world. Website analytical data can tell online store owners how a customer arrived at their store, which pages they viewed, how long they spent shopping, what products they viewed, what products they bought (if any) and alot more.
All this is possible due to javascript based analytics tracking systems that draw data from individuals by setting cookies on their computers. As with cookies in the real world being tasty and enjoyed by the majority they also have a great deal of value in the cyber world. Now what if someone was to take away your cookies from you? Not a nice thing right? Well that’s exactly what is being proposed online. The EU Cookie Directive is set out to do just that. Now this is only enforced on businesses based in Europe and the UK Government has confirmed that all website owners must abide by the new legislation by 26th of May 2012. What the legislation enforces is that website owners must notify visitors of the usage of cookies and must provide means of allowing visitors to accept or decline the usage of cookies on their computers.
The implications of this directive can cause a major blow to the UK based online businesses and start ups whilst giving the US a competitive advantage. Studies have already shown website owners seeing drops of up to 90% in traffic as indicated by their analytics software. This does not necessarily mean that the 90% drop has actually happened but it shows that this amount of visitors declined to having cookies stored on their computers. Websites in the UK will surely have a harder experience in being able to improve their online operations and marketing efforts.