I think Enhanced Ecommerce is the best thing to happen in Google Analytics for years for retailers.

Here’s why: people want products.

Real people come to ecommerce web sites for products – we hope. It’s the products that matter to people. Abstract concepts like ‘home pages’ or ‘categories’ are just the mechanisms which display the products, they do not have any interest in themselves.

Enhanced Ecommerce finally gives products their rightful place for retailers.

Retailers also tend to focus on products. In truth, many retailers are more excited by their products than by their customers.

I can remember how we all used to obsess over new products in my first job working in a sports shop in London back in the seventies. Decades later I see the same thing when I’m guiding retailers through the maze of Google Analytics reports. When we get to the products reports, suddenly the session catches fire. Instead of talking about things like ‘sources’ or earnestly studying lists of gobbledegook web site page URLs, we’re looking at things people recognise and care about. The names of their products.

But up until 2014 all that Google Analytics showed you was which items people had actually bought. This left a big hole in the data, since only a relatively small number of sessions end in a purchase. What about all those other sessions? The ones where people were looking at things, but not buying.

What products were those people looking at? Well, you could normally answer that question when it came to actual product pages. But how about category pages and sub-category pages? Those pages are like galleries, listing loads of products. But which ones? And which ones did people choose to click on?

This kind of thing obsessed us all back in the days when we agonised over which products to give how much space to in print catalogues. Teams of merchandisers argued over ‘look to book’ ratios.

In the catalogues, most of the time, each product only appeared in one place. The web changed all that. Suddenly we could put products in several categories. But which? It became tempting to put them in loads of places, leading to usability and navigation nightmares for the customers, reducing sales for us.

Meanwhile we tried to report on this from the perspective of ‘pageviews’ in GA. The fundamental starting points were the ‘page’ and the origin of the visit. True: you could reverse engineer the process from the starting point of the product purchased, or maybe even the ‘product page’ viewed. But it was not easy. The structure of the data was not really designed for this.

Off-line a store or market can be a destination. But on line it has to be the products.

You can store and report on a lot more information if you want to such as the cost price or margin, if you wish. You can add extra layers of detail, such as ‘where’ on the category page was this item was when it was clicked. I know that several of my clients spend a lot of time working with the order in which products are displayed on listing pages. They have to use external spreadsheets for doing that if they haven’t upgraded to Enhanced Ecommerce.

In this post I don’t want to go into all the extra product details you can track and analyse in the new GA. And I won’t go into the other huge improvements in Enhanced Ecommerce, notably much more useful and powerful funnel reporting. Those are vast improvements, but they are not a fundamental change.

The big change for retailers, in my opinion, is the introduction of the ‘product’ as a central concept in GA. Pageviews, sessions and sources are still key concepts, but they remain closely tied to concepts like ‘web sites’ in the ‘digital’ silo. GA has now moved into a bigger world.

By putting products central stage in Enhanced Ecommerce, Google Analytics has come of age for retailers.

That’s the key take-home point from this post. Others have written better than I can on the topics of everything from general introductions through to the nitty-gritty details of getting Enhanced Ecommerce right in Google Tag Manager. So for the rest of this post I’ll confine myself to assembling a list of good resources.

Resources for Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce

Here’s my pick of the best general introductions to the features of Enhanced Ecommerce. I’ve chosen some general introductions which contain plenty of examples and illustrations to show why you should upgrade. And also a very good technical guide to explain how to do so.

Google Analytics Focuses on Shopping & Merchandising Analysis

by Paul Lear
Start of a four part series. Very detailed, very good. Lots of tips on the hidden features of the new reports. Recommended.
Part Two
Part Three

Optimize Your Site With Enhanced Ecommerce

by Kristoffer Olofsson

Brief but good.

Ecommerce Tips for Google Tag Manager

by Simo Ahava

Simo Ahava’s blog is probably the best resource for the latest very practical guides to getting things right with Google Tag Manager. And if you’re migrating to Enhanced Ecommerce it makes a lot of sense to use GTM and a Data Layer at the same time. So this article is very important. It’s technical and contains code. This is a good thing.

Resources Related to Products and Merchandising

The concept at the heart of this post is that products and people are the most critical factors for ecommerce success. The manifestation of the products in a web site or app is just a necessary function of people choosing to buy products. So it would be daft of me not to point you to the Minethatdata blog which contains a wealth of material on the subject.

Here’s an extremely short post as a starting point:
http://blog.minethatdata.com/2014/12/why-i-harp-on-merchandise-productivity.html [Opens in new tab]

Maybe because they can “Add it now, Buy it later…”

Who “signs in” before they start shopping on an ecommerce site? Very few.

Who keeps their mobile device apps automatically signed-in? Very many.

These contrasting patterns of behaviour may provide the solution to the problems retailers have in attempting to track the 67% of customers who use multiple devices when shopping.

The language of our sites needs to respond to this evolution in behaviour.

Change the wording on your site: get rid of “sign in”. Replace it with “sync my stuff” or “keep my shopping”. And greet customers with “we’ve kept your shopping for you”.

Or maybe the phrase to use turns out to be based on “Add it Now, Buy it Later”

Updates

July 2014 – Idea: try using Amazon’s “Add it Now, Buy it Later” catch-phrase
May 2014 – Tip: use abandoned cart email to promote sign-in
November 2013 – Background – Nielsen Norman on cross-device user experience
April 2013 – Data – Google research on cross-device shopping

For years now ecommerce analytics has been trying to deal with a loss of useful data: the more devices people use the harder it is to work out what they’re doing with them. But this change in behaviour may also hold out hope of a solution.

Analytics vendors are introducing technical tools to help with the change. For example, in 2012 Google Analytics announced “Universal Analytics” which allows site owners to identify visitors across multiple devices using a universal ID.

But this function only works if people do sign in.

On an ecommerce site if the visitor is a returning customer and if they are using the checkout during this particular visit and if they have opted to ‘create an account’ as part of a previous purchase… then they may indeed sign in for the last part of the visit.

That’s a lot of ‘ifs’.

In real life, when the visitor is only on the site to do a bit of product research (perhaps they are using a phone and have no intention of trying to buy while out and about) then the chances of them signing in when they land on the site is very low. And all those other ‘ifs’ still apply: they have to be a returning customer and they need to have an account.

As for someone who has not previously bought something: who on earth would waste their time creating an account just to look? Almost nobody.

Just change the words

The solution may lie with the cause of the problem: multiple devices.

What if we re-phrase the question as “who has their phone and tablet apps configured to log in straight away?” or “who expects their read/unread email and social data to be synchronised across all their devices?” The answer becomes ‘almost everybody’.

You could reduce the impact of the multiple device problem with a simple change of wording, not a change in technology.

Stop trying to get people to do something which only suits site-owners and start thinking in terms of benefits to visitors.

1. Stop thinking in terms of “sign in” and “log in” and “create an account”
2. Apply the Golden Rule: think in terms of customer benefit
3. State the benefit: “sync my stuff”

Even the biggest of those ‘if’ challenges now becomes do-able.

Even a visitor who has not yet bought, but has spent enough time researching to know that they’ll probably buy from you, might like the idea of having their ‘recently viewed items’ available across devices. They can pick up their research where they left off. And if they’ve added to cart but don’t want to fiddle around with payments on their phone, the idea will be even more appealing.

Tracking people across multiple devices does nothing for individual visitors and some may find it intrusive. Asking for consent to do this might even have people opting out of the existing tracking.

But offer people the convenience of keeping track of details so they can pick up where they left off and many will like the idea. Some may choose your site over ones that are less convenient to use.

Synchronising information across all devices may become an expected feature of good ecommerce sites. You may lose out if you don’t start heading in this direction. The universal analytics identity key may turn out to be the least important benefit. But it’s a reason to get going on the project now.

You can start by changing just a couple of words. It’s got to be worth a try.

I’m just using “Sync my stuff” as an example. But some other phrase for this process may eventually emerge: see the update below about Amazon’s “Add now, Buy later” slogan.

There’s one big question which will probably have more than one answer:

What do you think would work on your site?

PS: Bonus Tip

I learnt a lesson when working on a site which had a high level of repeat customers. The feedback system comments revealed that people were surprised if they logged in and found items from previous abandoned carts suddenly reappearing.

Customers wondered if something was wrong with the site and some even suspected the site of trying to sneakily increase the value of the order.

There was an easy solution: we inserted an “added on (the date)” detail for each order line and the comments dried up.

Updates

July 2014 Amazon’s “Add it Now, Buy it Later” catch-phrase is intended to promote their ‘add from Twitter’ function, but my feeling is that this has the potential to turn into a more generic phrase, in the same way that their “One Click” has. It might be worth trying this phrase as a promotion on your mobile site. You could even experiment with the call to action on your mobile “add to cart” buttons — for example a very wordy “Add to Cart (you can buy later)”.

May 2014 I forget where I saw this (someone remind me and I will link), but it’s a great idea. Your abandoned cart email is a good place to encourage people to sign in on all their devices. You might even find that reminding customers they can get back to their products via their tablet or their desktop or their phone might encourage people to try it just to see…

November 2013 Here’s an interesting article on the Nielsen Norman Group site which is very relevant to the cross-device, cross-channel user experience. The first example is a great example of how Amazon prime do it for streaming video, but you could use this approach for the shopping cart (or even checkout…). Instead of “resume viewing” try a greeting like “we’ve kept your stuff”: [opens in new tab] http://www.nngroup.com/articles/seamless-cross-channel/

April 2013 I’ve just found some useful data on the use of multiple devices or ‘screens’ when shopping. In summer 2012 Google published a study based on usage diaries etc (so not just ‘a survey’) which showed 67% of participants using multiple screens for shopping. http://www.google.com/think/research-studies/the-new-multi-screen-world-study.html

I know what a pain it is having to jump from post to post to get the current version of a piece of advice or a technique.

So when something on this blog is out of date I try to update the original article instead of writing a new one. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up with all the changes in Google Analytics.

I also try to add new external resources when I can.

The down-side of this is that my posts get longer and longer. And they’re probably too long to start with!

But here’s a list of the last changes, all in one place.

Voice of Customer Surveys: I’ve added some recent data which shows just how big the difference in response rate is between a customer-initiated “Please take our survey” link and an embedded form.

Google Analytics Checkout Abandon Rates: How to use Google Documents with the GA API to show all the individual stage-by-stage abandon rates in one chart and with the same Y axis. This is more complicated than using a Custom Dashboard, but is much better for making comparisons.

Tracking social media and the ‘direct’ black hole: Trying to track untagged ‘organic/natural’ social referrals? The data that never was. I’m almost as obsessed by the ‘direct’ problem as I am by customer surveys. (I’ll leave the ‘not provided’ disappearing data fiasco for others.) Plenty of updates at the end of my original post.

Tracking Error Messages in GA: More discussion on the pros and cons of Events versus Virtual Pageviews and new resources on the ‘Events’ approach. How you do it is not the point. The benefit is in doing it. Tracking error messages is a shortcut to improving the usability of your site.

Why you need more than one profile in Google Analytics: I used to say 2, now I’m saying at least 3. A short and sweet lesson from the march of time. One day you will need a spare. I learnt the hard way.

Custom Channel Groupings in Multi-channel-funnels: Advice about checking the standard channel groupings in MCF and then customising them. Time spent getting familiar with these features and the interface will be rewarded even more in the future as these aspects become more important in GA and Universal Analytics.

Working with Brand Keywords and other Filtering Fun: The resources section at the bottom of this post is growing steadily. Interesting ideas for categorisation from L3 Analytics and a great regex resource from Brian Clifton.

EU Cookie Law: The ‘updates’ section at the end of this post is an extremely long one. I’ve tried to add links to the best of the articles and discussions on the subject as they appeared.

Find the data which matters, even without weighted sort: The update explains how the introduction of GA ‘Weighted Sort’ made this technique obsolete. But since then weighted sort has turned out to be a bit elusive. So the old threshold filter can still come in handy.

People are really helpful, given half a chance. Your customers will tell you what they want and how to make your site work better, if you’ll just let them.

Surveys are the secret.

Updates

• January 2015: Getting feedback on a mobile phone via the email receipt. Brilliant example via Joshua Porter.
• June 2014: Link to a useful “thank you page design” article and confirmation that response rates from unhelpful thank you pages are very low
• June 2013: data suggesting that response rates are low from thank you pages which do not contain order details

I’ve written and spoken a lot about “voice of customer” surveys and I keep this post up to date with new ideas as I come across them.

That’s because surveys are such a great source of direct guidance on what you need to do to make your site better for your visitors and better for you. Face to face interviews and usability tests can be even more valuable, but they’re more expensive to run and to analyse.

A couple of things have just come up which bring me back to the subject.

• One was seeing some very interesting data about the different methods for collecting survey data.
• The other was an example of how not to do it: a personal experience of a survey which failed to get the vital information. Both examples provide evidence of why an embedded “any comments” free text survey in plain view, right on the order confirmation page, is a killer app for improving ecommerce sites.

Data on Survey Response Rates

iPerceptions added a new type of survey to their range of (very good) systems in May 2012. They’re called “Comment Cards” and are more of a visitor-feedback system than a survey tool. The key point about these is that they use one of those small invitation tabs down at the bottom of the screen:

This kind of “solicitation” is one used by several other feedback systems and is less intrusive than the overlays which iPerceptions use on some of their other systems, such as their famous 4Q and their enterprise level webValidator.

At the time of the launch iPerceptions published a blog post explaining the features of the new “Comment Card” system. Near the end of the article there was a section on the disadvantages of this kind of “Visitor-initiated Feedback” system. It contained some data which caught my eye:

“Visitor-initiated feedback garners a significantly lower response rate, averaging 0.1% of website traffic, versus active solutions which boast a 2-5% response rate.”

The 2-5% for an active solution is the kind of figure I expected, although I have never written about it before because I did not have a source I could trust. This data is from one of the major vendors of these systems, so I imagine that the sample size was big. This means that these response rates can be treated as some kind of a benchmark.

I’ve never been keen on using active solutions on an ecommerce site. It just doesn’t seem wise to float a survey invitation in front of a potential customer. We normally strip out anything which could get in the way of someone trying to buy something from our sites. And according to this data only about 5% would fill in the survey, meaning that the other 95% clicked the “get this thing out of my way” button. Ouch.

The visitor-initiated systems don’t have the same problem. 99.9% of people ignore them. So they collect very little data. And if someone does click on the button, it’s normally because they want to complain, as iPerceptions point out:

“Visitor-initiated feedback produces much more negative feedback than an active solicitation, which captures a representative sample of negative and positive views. As a result, it can be difficult to give appropriate weight to the feedback, or consider the feedback in the context of visitors’ overall experience.”

I was really interested by this data because of the way it compares with the method some of my clients use.

The ecommerce customer feedback system I encourage you to try doesn’t need an invitation. It’s a simple form embedded in the order confirmation page. Like this:

A form on the ‘thank you’ page cannot get in the way of a purchase.

People will post praise as well as complaints. The split is usually around 50/50 and knowing what language your customers use to describe your strengths is extremely valuable for SEO and marketing copy.

Don’t worry: you will also get to hear plenty about bugs and usability problems which forced some people come back to try again later.

And the response rates?

I’ve just looked at a sample of 100,000 orders. 35% of customers left some feedback on their order. 10% left a free text comment. That’s 10% of orders, not 10% of survey responses.

To emphasise the difference, I’ve also looked at an example where the site changed from using an embedded survey to user-initiated ‘click here to provide feedback’ link. The response rate fell from 10% to below 1% and the content of the comments shifted to strongly negative. Give people a form, right there on the page…

Update June 2013 But see new data below showing how an uninteresting or frustrating ‘thank you’ page can halve these rates.

Those comments are the real seam of gold. Like I said, people are very helpful if you give them the chance.

To find out more about these surveys, here’s the start of a two-part series I wrote for Econsultancy: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9134-best-practices-for-e-commerce-consumer-surveys [Opens in new tab]

And, since it would be daft not to do so, here’s an example of a live embedded survey form. It’s a very crude one, using a free account from SurveyGizmo. The survey is not pretty but it has the fields I need and I’m sure you could style one better than this.

The key reason for using Survey Gizmo for this example is that survey Gizmo allows me to also pass information into GA as a script within the survey’s ‘Thank you page’. In this instance I am recording the fact that someone has completed the survey as a ‘visitor scope’ custom variable, so that I can see if survey respondents return to the site in another session. I’m also recording the values of two of the questions (task completion and Net Promoter) as events. I chose an event for the NPS so that I can easily report on the average for that value in GA, which is useful to see even though it does not do the actual NPS calculation.

The Survey Gizmo code I use for the ga.js on this site (and thank you for S Gizmo support for helping me sort this out) is:

$(document).ready(function() {
_gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',4,'Survey Completed','Yes',1]);
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'survey', 'Completion answered','[question("value"),id="2"]']);
_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'survey', 'NPS answered','[question("value"),id="21"]']);
});

The custom variable will only be sent along with the next hit to GA. In this case there’s no problem because the thank you screen is also sending events. But that’s something to consider if you just want to use custom variables. You would need to edit the question IDs and other details to suit your own survey, of course.

How Not to Do It

As you can tell, I'm a big fan of customer surveys. But you must give people the chance to tell you what matters to them. A free text comment field is vital, even if it's hard work analysing it. I know about the work. We sometimes process more than a thousand of these per week as part of our routine analysis.

I recently had a personal experience which drove the point home to me. I used a web site to book my car in for some work. There was a problem with the site which meant that I did not receive the necessary confirmation. I got a raw system error, in fact. And that made me very worried!

I emailed the company to ask if the booking had been made. The contact centre were fine and sent me a .pdf copy.

But the experience had left me wondering if there might have been other technical issues. For example, I wondered if the booking would actually have made it through to the branch in question.

I had lost confidence. I did not want to turn up at 8:30 in the morning only to be told that I would have to come back another day. So I phoned the branch. All was fine and they provided their usual excellent service.

A while later, an email arrived asking me to complete a survey. I wanted to help. I wanted to explain how the experience on the web site had left me feeling uncertain about the rest of their booking system and that the side effect of this was still uncomfortable even after the reply from the contact centre.

Given what I do for a living, I often record my own use of other sites. Here's what happened:

The summary version:

The survey included a series of questions, some of which didn't really have an appropriate answer, but I completed it as best I could.

My answers would have appeared very contradictory, because there was no way of indicating that I had been unable to complete the task. My answers suggest that I was there to do something which the site allows, and that I was doing it for a reason that would make sense. And then I seem to regard it as an unsatisfactory experience.

The survey itself does not make it clear whether there will be more questions, so I submitted the first responses in the hope that there might he a comments field. But no. That's it. I couldn't tell them about the server error. I couldn't tell them about the loss of confidence. I couldn't suggest that the email response could have included an "I've checked on the branch calendar..." line, or that maybe they should send out a follow-up email "from" the branch as well.

What a wasted opportunity.

If you're going to ask people for feedback, give them the chance to tell you what they think matters. Don't limit yourself to the things you think might be relevant. Leave space for the "unknown unknowns" because that's where the real value is.

Resources for Voice of Customer Surveys and Feedback

[All open in new window.]

• Articles about surveys on e-consultancy on why customer surveys are so valuable and how to set up customer surveys of the kind described here
• Smart Insights list of survey and feedback systems
• RunOurSurvey have a lot of survey and feedback material on their site, including a summary of the pros and cons of several of the usual subjects: "SurveyMonkey Is Not The Only Tool for Your Small Business Customer Survey" They offer a package deal kit containing templates and instructions and a support portal for using Google Docs to run surveys (if I understand correctly -- >>>I have not personally used this<<<).
• Brandsavant have a fun guide (you read right) to analysing sentiment in free-text comments here: http://brandsavant.com/how-to-measure-online-sentiment-a-definitive-guide/ The approach we use here is more structured and less enjoyable, but we have to do it as routine work.

Updates

January 2015
Getting feedback from people on mobile phones is a challenge: asking people to type is a barrier. That's why I'm particularly impressed by Joshua Porter's detailed analysis of the feedback-survey flow embedded in Square's email receipts: http://bokardo.com/archives/details-squares-email-receipt-and-feedback-flow/ [Opens in a new window].



Photo: Joshua Porter

This also prompts me to think that perhaps it would be good to try embedding one of the short surveys into all ecommerce email receipts. I'm embarrassed to admit that I haven't done this, although I have used a two-part system where the customer is offered a survey on the thank-you page and then a second survey a couple of weeks later to ask about delivery and product satisfaction. We can then calculate the delta between NPS at two stages, which turned out to be strongly connected with any delivery snafus.
The Square example is a great one to follow, I think. My only suggestion is that I would offer 3 choices: good, bad and indifferent. I suspect this would increase the response rate and give a better understanding. I also think the follow-up questions (read the original article to see them) would be better with my favourite 'any other comments'. As things are now I think people may frame their response in the context of the standard answers shown and their 'other' will be phrased in a similar way.

June 2014
Here's a useful article on the subject of "Thank You" pages which is very relevant to my points about survey response rates: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2014/06/03/thank-you-pages [Opens in a new window]
If you want to get a decent response to your feedback form, you need to have a thank you page which contains enough to keep people interested. I've now worked on more sites which have minimal details in their confirmation pages (Magento, I'm looking at you) and my latest data confirms that if you don't at least have the details of the order, your customer will not stick around long enough to see anything else.

June 2013
I've just noticed an interesting change in the response rates when looking at a survey embedded in a weak confirmation page. By 'weak' I mean a confirmation page which just says 'Thank you for your order' and does not provide details of the order itself.

I suspect people leave the page very quickly on this site because it does not even provide the reassurance of being able to check the order. And there's nothing else of interest. (Here's a link to 10 creative ideas for improving order confirmation pages: http://www.getelastic.com/11-ways-to-optimize-thank-you-pages/ [opens in new tab] ).

In this case the completion rates are roughly half what I would expect. Around 15% of customers start the survey and only about 5% of all customers leave a text comment. There's still plenty of valuable insight from the comments. But the lesson here is about how engagement levels on 'thank you' pages can vary.

Site owners in the UK have had several years to get to grips with implementing the EU Tracking directive. The period of grace ended on May 26th 2012 and so UK ecommerce sites have no excuse for not complying with our version of the EU ‘Cookie Law’.

But what do you really need to do? There was a lot of fear, Uncertainty and Doubt back in 2012. The sneers of “they cannot be serious” were joined by complaints that “it will set back the economy”.

By 2014 the situation was becoming clear, so I recommend you skip to the key updates in the resources section below. To skip straight to the updates, click here: [Updated: June 2014 with a link to a great summary of what’s actually been done in the way of enforcement].

I had already sent out my own thoughts on the subject to my email list months before writing this original blog post in 2012. So I wasn’t going to add yet more to the public debate by writing a blog post. But… I’m a great believer in using Google Analytics Site Search Reports as a way of finding out what people want. And those reports show that people were coming to this site looking for information about the EU cookie law.

So here goes.

What you need to do now

1. Do an audit of your site and document what you’re tracking, how and why
2. Update your privacy policy to include the information

Taking these first steps towards obeying the law ought to be sufficient to reduce the chances of a fine.

But you shouldn’t stop right there. That would be particularly irresponsible if you’re a prominent site which is more likely to attract the attention of someone who wants to complain to the ICO either out of malice or simply to provoke a test case.

Because:

Strictly speaking, the law requires you to have an opt-in consent system live on the site. Now.

So:

3. You should also be able to at least show that you’re working on your solution to the requirement to ask all visitors to your site to actively give consent for you to use cookies or any similar tracking systems. [Update: when Dan Barker’s 2014 post you will see how this aspect of ‘doing something’ has a real impact on the attitude taken by the ICO]

EU Cookie Law Opt-in Systems

The general opinion in most of the discussion on the subject I have seen is that sites will be able to get away with breaking the consent aspect of the law for a bit longer, provided that they can show they have started to comply by documenting the audit and updating their privacy policy.

This opinion is based on a series of reasonable assumptions:

• That the law is intended to target sites which are using tracking in suspicious or devious ways, not sites which are using the standard analytics and marketing systems
• That the ICO does not have a huge team to police this and start actively checking every site

The opinion is supported by things like this guide to implementing the law on public sector websites issued by the UK Government Digital Service:

http://alphagov.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/gds-cookies-implementer-guide.pdf [Opens in new tab]

At the moment there are very few examples to look at out in the wild. You can bet that some more will appear on the day itself on big-name sites such as BBC, Amazon, Tesco, ASOS etc. If I remember correctly Argos went live with one when the law took effect last year, but removed it within hours as soon as the period of grace was announced.

The best example I have seen so far is the one on part of the BT site:

And here’s a video of it in action:

You can visit the site to see it for yourself here:
http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/ [Opens in new tab]

This is particularly good for these reasons

• It’s a prominent overlay which appears when someone lands on the site.
  • But because this position is also widely used for things like survey invitation and “you may also like” promotions, the notice may be affected by a convenient form of ‘banner blindness’
  • People may be more likely to ignore it and assume that whatever the site is trying to get them to do will go away. Which it does.
  • Then viewing any more pages after this one will be taken as having opted-in. (Probably not 100% compliant, but that would be a fight which would make the lawyers rich.)
• The language used makes accepting the default opt-in the most simple choice.
  • Using phrases such as “if you would like” and “change your settings” subtly conveys the idea that this would be something extra to do
  • So the tempting thing to do take the easy option and do nothing

These factors combine to keep the disruption to the visitors experience to a minimum and make it most likely that the site can carry on tracking just as before.

The BT example is worth examining further. The interface they’ve provided for managing the cookie settings is extremely good and is also designed to reduce the risk of a visitor insisting that nothing is stored.

• The language does not use technical jargon: ‘cookies’ are mentioned with a link to another resource, not a wordy explanation
• The copy describes the tracking in terms of benefits to the visitor
• The sliding control shows which ‘benefits’ have been lost as the tracking is reduced which might encourage people to turn them back on

That’s impressive. The interface avoids a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ choice and pulls of something much more complex which may still allow them to record some valuable data. Visitors choose between the levels of ‘intrusiveness’ specified in the guidance on the directive, in a way which does not use complex language and encourages people to turn off less of the tracking.

Plenty of other solutions will appear as models during the next few months.

The need may also only be relatively short-lived. The browser developers will introduce functions for this kind of thing in due course since concerns about tracking are international.

But there will be a considerable gap before a universal solution such as that appears.

So you do need to do something now.

EU Cookie Law Resources

Official Guidance

The ICO’s Official Guide [.pdf Download]

Updates and Discussions

• [Update October 2014] A couple of years on from the start of enforcement, Dan Barker published an excellent summary of the impact of the cookie in the UK in 2014 [opens in new window]. If you’re concerned about what you need to keep out of trouble, Dan’s article contains all you need to know. The comments are also informed and informative.
  Meanwhile Heather Burns specialises in writing and talking about the subject and has a whole category of posts about the EU Cookie Law [Opens in new tab].
• [Update June 2012] The latest and best summary of the current situation, I believe, is this article from Brian Clifton: http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/2012/06/11/google-analytics-and-the-new-eu-privacy-law-3/ [Opens in new tab].
  In particular the article makes very clear the difference between anonymous plain web analytics systems, such as Google Analytics, which use first-party cookies and the more complex situation which applies when advertising systems and social functions are involved and use third-cookies. Such systems are widespread on many ecommerce sites these days. Doubleclick is one common example. AddThis, Sharethis and Liveperson Chat are also cited by Brian. YouTube is yet another. The article is a vital read.
• [Update May 2012] Important: Just before May 26th the ICO updated their guidance to clarify that ‘implied consent’ is an option. Read their announcement and download the official guidance here: http://www.ico.gov.uk/news/blog/2012/updated-ico-advice-guidance-e-privacy-directive-eu-cookie-law.aspx [Opens in new tab]
  As soon as the deadline passed, we started to see some useful examples of cookie law implementations. Smart Insights have a good round-up and on-going discussion here: http://www.smartinsights.com/marketplace-analysis/digital-marketing-laws/how-are-companies-complying-with-the-new-cookie-law/ [Opens in new tab]
  And what about mobiles?? Econsultancy discuss the usability train-wreck which is getting consent on a phone-sized screen here: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9773-how-will-the-eu-cookie-law-affect-mobile-marketing [Opens in new tab]
  Meanwhile Smart Insights address the subject of email here: http://www.smartinsights.com/marketplace-analysis/digital-marketing-laws/the-cookie-law-email-marketing-and-open-tracking/ [Opens in new tab]
• [Update April 2012] There’s an extremely interesting discussion in the comments thread on this post from the Government Digital Service: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/03/19/its-not-about-cookies-its-about-privacy/ [Opens in new tab]
  And this article in The Register includes valuable responses from the ICO to specific questions about analytics tracking: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/05/eprivacy_directive_web_analytics/ [Opens in new tab]
  Dave Evans from the ICO gives very helpful answers to specific questions in this Econsultancy interview: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9610-q-a-the-ico-s-dave-evans-on-eu-cookie-law-compliance [Opens in new tabs]
• Brian Clifton has published several thoughtful and authoritative items about the EU Privacy Law. The latest and most important article is the one posted in June 2011, after the UK period of grace had come to an end and taking into account the last-minute clarifications from the ICO: http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/2012/06/11/google-analytics-and-the-new-eu-privacy-law-3/ [Opens in new tab]
  10 Point Best Practice Guide for Working with Google Analytics [Opens in new tab]
  Original post and very informative discussion thread on the the EU privacy law [Opens in new tab]
  Google Analytics and the new EU privacy law #2 [Opens in new tab]
• Econsultancy have published several very good articles on the subject
  What econsultancy are doing themselves. [Opens in new tab]
  http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9416-eu-cookie-law-uk-government-crumbles [Opens in new tab]
  Another post from Econsultancy which includes an extensive discussion thread. Phil Pearce has contributed some particularly interesting comments here:
  http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9298-82-of-digital-marketers-see-the-eu-cookie-law-as-bad-for-the-web-survey#blog_comment_88290 [Opens in new tab]
  Econsultancy’s full Guide to Compliance is available for purchase here: http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/the-eu-cookie-law-a-guide-to-compliance [Opens in new tab] There’s a free sample available for download.
• I particularly like this article by Colin O’Maley on the Association of Online Publisher’s site for the measured and sensible approach. The point about the difference between ‘opt-in’ and ‘consent’ is a very good one. [Update] But be sure to read the latest ICO guidance on this point, linked to above, as the advice on this point was revised just before May 26th. http://www.ukaop.org.uk/news/eu-privacy-directive-consent-opt-in-cookies-evidon3549.html [Opens in a new tab]

Acknowledgements

Although there’s no obvious article for me to link to, it seems wrong to write anything on this subject without crediting some people who have put notable efforts into covering the subject:

• Vicky Brock from Highland Business Research is responsible for the Freedom of Information request which obtained the famous data on the ICO’s 90% drop in recorded visits after they implemented their cookie opt-in. Vicky is also a member of the board of the Digital Analytics Association.
• Phil Pearce has been compiling research and resources on this subject for a long time. He’s maintaining the material he has curated in a Dropbox which he shares with interested parties. You can contact Phil via his Linked-in profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/philpearce