Performance cookies are designed to collect user data as people visit your website. These cookies are also called analytics cookies, and for good reason.
Performance/analytics cookies help your business understand just how users are interacting with your website—what pages they’re visiting, how long they’re staying, and what actions they’re taking—and you can use these cookies to sharpen your advertising, marketing, and content creation efforts to increase conversion rates.
It's in your best interest to familiarize yourself with performance cookies if you want to utilize them to your advantage. This is true not only for marketing/advertising purposes but also data privacy compliance and safeguarding your important information.
Performance cookies are fundamental to web analytics. Without them, you really don’t have any relevant information about user interaction.
Performance cookies are different from essential or functional cookies—which are necessary cookies that enable basic website functionality—and the information they provide is the “secret sauce” so many successful companies utilize to inform business decisions.
Performance cookies can be used to track analytics like:
They also help you identify areas of your website that need improvement. For example, analyzing things like page load speeds or user navigation patterns can lead your developers to improve webpage layouts and content funnels.
With all that performance cookies do behind the scenes, it’s understandable that users might be a little wary of having data collected while they visit your website. Fortunately, regulations are in place that help find a balance between the website optimization benefits performance cookies bring and the data privacy concerns of users.
Privacy law regulations like PIPEDA in Canada, GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California and others all aim to help define privacy lines and what fines and punishments need be applied when those lines are crossed. Successful businesses not only comply with these regulations but manage their data (and by extension their website) in ways that secure user trust.
It’s your job to stay informed about the latest data privacy, security, and protection regulations. Many enterprise-level companies use a third-party data privacy partner to always ensure compliance.
This makes conducting regular audits and maintaining compliance easier even if policies change. Privacy experts help you validate that regulatory requirements are being followed and you have nothing to worry about.
Performance cookies are integral to your website success, and as such they need to be managed with a comprehensive understanding of their privacy implications and analytics potential. You need to balance technical optimization with user privacy to not only comply with most laws but stand out in a crowded online landscape.
There’s a lot of inherent power in performance cookies. You just need to know how to utilize it.
Osman Husain
Osman is the content lead at Enzuzo. He has a background in data privacy management via a two-year role at ExpressVPN and extensive freelance work with cybersecurity and blockchain companies. Osman also holds an MBA from the Toronto Metropolitan University.