comScore Tracking Cookie Findings

I originally wrote back in April about the comScore study on cookie deletion and what were the motivations of the computer users to become serial cookie deleters. Last week the full report finally came out and the findings were interesting…

It turns out serial cookie deleters only represent 7% of the population of total internet eyes. But because of their habits of cleaning out their cookie history they represent 35% of all cookies!

What does that mean?

This minority has really skewed the number of uniques (x2.5), adding fuel to the fire regarding the validity of the unque visitors metric. Total visits seems like a more consistent metric even more now since we see the unques number can be inflated dramatically by such a small population (~14 million)

If you are unhappy with that inflation number don’t even think about doing something like tracking based on a users IP address. The comScore report stated that due to dynamic IP assignment that the average home computer has 10.5 different IP addresses in a month! Now that’s dirty data

To read the full report go here: http://www.comscore.com/request/cookie_deletion.asp