Do Cookies Work on Mobile Phones? (Example)

Published on
June 3, 2015
Contributors
Kiri Tamte-Horan
kiri@vicimediainc.com

Kiri Tamte-Horan is the Director of Digital Operations at Vici, and oversees the stellar Philadelphia Operations team through the development, implementation, and reporting of all digital campaigns. Kiri has managed hundreds of campaigns spanning Display, Video, and Social platforms, and has generated countless calls and conversions for clients across the country. Kiri is certified in Google Tag Manager and Acquisio, as well as Google AdWords Fundamentals and Display Advertising. Additionally, Kiri has a certification from Disney Institute’s Leadership Excellence. Kiri was the campaign manager for an award winning Digital Campaign as awarded by the Maryland Tourism Council in 2015.

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A cookie is is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user's web browser while the user is browsing that website. A cookie can track everything from the websites the user visits afterwards, their behavior, purchase decisions, etc. Cookies can even deploy ads back to the user inviting them to revisit the original website. But do these cookies work on mobile phones?

It is a common belief that cookies can’t work on mobile, however this statement isn’t completely accurate. Most mobile web browsers do accept first party-cookies, in other words, a cookie whose domain is the same as the domain of the visited website. However, different mobile browsers behave differently when it comes to accepting third-party cookies, or cookies whose domain is different from the visited website

And when you are comparing mobile broswers, to mobile apps, the rules again change. A mobile app uses technology called a webview to display online content. Cookies are stored within a webview like they are stored in a browser setting. Webview is similar to mobile browsers because it is unique per application, and cannot share cookie information between apps or the device’s web browser. Here's a breakdown by the IAB of different browsers and the different cookies they accept

Because cookie tracking on mobile can be limited, a few alternative methods of tracking have been developed. The four most common are as follows: Client/Device Generated Identifier, Statistical ID, HTML5 Cookie Tracking, and Universal Login Tracking. Read more about these here.

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