I’m sure you have heard of cookies when referring to the internet and they are not the sweet delicious kind I’d like to be eating right now. There is an ongoing debate about cookies and user privacy issues but at the same time cookies make the web a lot easier to navigate. Web designers like cookies because they also make the user experience on websites much better and make it easier to track and gather accurate information about their site’s visitors.

But there are some limitations with cookies. Users have the ability to erase cookies or turn them on and off making tracking inconsistent. For instance, iPhone and iPad allow third party cookies but users have to manually turn the cookies on to enable them. Most people are not going to take the time to turn them on or they will forget to do it. iPhone and iPad also partially scrub IP addresses making it harder to get a clean device fingerprint. Ad networks use a practice called frequency capping to monitor and regulate how often a specific visitor to a website is shown a particular advertisement. Without cookies, the ad networks do not have enough information to do frequency capping, thus limiting their ability to monetize that publisher’s inventory and making mobile ad space less profitable.

Certain companies and now the advertising community is attempting to do server-side “device fingerprinting”, which is a technique that analyzes the information sent automatically to websites by all of these smart devices that can statistically identify them. But even device fingerprinting is susceptible to issues of accuracy just like cookies, i.e. multiple users on one device, using a public device, and partially scrubbed IP addresses which negatively impacts the ability for a network to put a frequency cap on ads.

Mobile advertising is not complete the way that online advertising is because of trackability and content limitations. These limitations are due to the lack of third party cookies allowed, which has a domino effect on frequency capping and affective ad distribution in the mobile space, therefore resulting in limited monetization of ad inventory.
Our partners along with PageWoo are working to solve the tracking and content problems so that mobile advertising can come into it’s own and transcend it’s current mediocre status as a smaller subset of the overall online advertising market.

Posted by Duffy-Marie Arnoult, Director of New Media, PageWoo