What could have happened if the Cookie Law hadn’t Crumbled
So the EU cookie law that was going to make all of our sites illegal or at least cause us problems with gathering analytics, turned out to be no real trouble at all. The last minute softening on the Cookie law allowed us to assume the site visitor was happy with us using cookies and they could click a single button to acknowledge this. Very little seems to have changed and we’ve noticed very little change to the analytics. What would have happened though if the law hadn’t been changed at the 11th hour?
One of our clients is a legal firm who have to be extra careful about the wording on their site or fall foul of The Solicitors Regulation Authority who can fine them or send them to jail for misleading potential clients. With the cookie law deadline looming they put in-place a banner that followed the letter of the law in its pre softened form. All though the question in the banner was very well written and informative it ultimately asked if you gave your consent to receiving Google Analytics cookies, Yes or No? So what was the outcome from this approach which we all would have had to follow? Over the month of June the total number of visits recorded by Google analytics was down by 86% and organic traffic by 93%. Some areas like pages per visit, average visit duration and bounce rate all improved for the visitors that were giving cookie consent.
It’s an interesting insight to what could have happened to our analytics and how ineffective they would have become.
If you’re still not sure where you stand with cookies then I recommend you check out the excellent video made by James and Nick.
