Tips to plan for a Future without Cookie Tracking

From a digital practitioner point of view “do not track” is the least of my worries but future news about Microsoft and Google pursuing cookie-less tracking capabilities indicates to me that education on how digital information is collected and shared will become even more significant in the near future.

 

Rather than panicking, there is a lot we can do today to enact guiding principles that will likely ease a change into tighter privacy controls in the future.

Education

One of the main problems facing digital marketing and analytics practitioners will be education. The industry has evolved so quickly that much of the technology that we rely on every day is likely taken for decided.

Personalization is one such area that relies on tracking, profiling, and delivering a lot of information about visitor preferences and behavior, which many of us likely take for decided.

One might fight that personalization is a byproduct of contextual advertising, and without underlying tracking technologies, wouldn't be possible to deliver.

Teasing apart a key delivery machine such as a session or persistent cookie will be very challenging, but explaining the significance of cookies and their usage to visitors and customers even more so.

What can you do to get ready?

1. Ensure your privacy policy is up to date and fully clear.

2. Explain what tracking technologies are used .

3. What cookies are working and for what reason.

Procedure

It’s probably safe to say that aside from a few exact highly-regulated industries and regions, most digital marketing practitioners don’t spent too much time or due industry in reviewing data usage models with third-party vendors and their technology.

Regulators focus both on collection and usage of data in these scenarios, mainly when third parties are involved because in many cases, these partners assume ownership of the data collected on your digital properties. This is the same reason why many browsers repeatedly block third-party cookies, to ensure data collection services and the usage of guest information are being entrusted to the right recipients.

What can you do to get ready?

4. Explain how data collected is used.

5. Explain how disabling functionality may affect user experience or functionality.

6. Ensure correlating verbiage between your privacy policy and suitable use policy are complementary.

Consent

In my view, this is where most of the opportunity is for much of North America. Very few companies really gather consent in a clear and concise manner.

To be brutally honest, most of us think that relying on a single line radio box at the bottom of a registration page, with a link to a hundred page disclosure is suitable. From a legal standpoint, it probably will cover you from any proceedings, but from a customer experience perspective, hundreds of pages of disclosure tend to make the average Joe either uninterested or a little paranoid.

What can you do to prepare?

7. Civilize your terms and conditions. Less legalese and more transparency.

8. Divide your service level agreement and delivery conditions from your data consent.

9. begin ways visitors and customers can opt-into and out of technology that enables digital marketing and personalization quickly and easily.

Conclusion

Think about the steps you can take today to inspire a greater confidence in your digital business and marketing hard work today. Sometimes little things go a long way to earn the value and trust of visitors and customers, making the impact of future technology tracking capabilities or narrow guidelines easier to transition into.

How to develop Your Website to More Languages.

If you have a really fashionable website, the idea of expanding that site to reach more languages has maybe crossed your mind. Such an expansion could mean a broader audience reaches in more countries, higher traffic, and the potential for more revenue.

The latest webmaster help video, featuring Google's Developer Programs Tech Lead Maile Ohye, gives some huge advice and best practices for expanding into additional languages and country-based language variations and ensuring your site is search-friendly.

Much of the video covers belongings like how you should approach a language expansion, things you should consider before doing it, and cases on how this can be done. It also touches on a couple of the more important search issues that can crash a website regarding multiple languages.

One of the more significant things to be sure you include on international variations of a website is the special language and regional tags that can help Google understand how they should be helping your websites and to what languages and countries. The use of rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is highly recommended to avoid many issues. Google has an entire help document on how to use these tags correctly and successfully.

One large potential search issue sites find out with language expansion are when sites the incorrect page is shown in the search results for the incorrect user. Another common issue is when the search outcome show similar URLs from your site, which confuses the user about which pages they should be going to, and why there are two unusual pages offered for apparently the same site and content.

Lastly, search engines might not be alert of all the different languages and language variations that website make, or they omit some pages for special languages because Google doesn't know that the seemingly duplicate pages are actually serving a different audience or language variation.

The entire video is very detailed and extensive. It is well worth watching if you're considering development into different countries and languages, so you can be aware of all these types of problems and how Google recommends you solve them to best serve your users.

Rosalind Franklin and Photo 51 privileged in Google Doodle

On what would have been her 93rd birthday, today's Google Doodle honors Rosalind Franklin. Franklin took an X-ray diffraction image of the DNA molecule in 1952. The image was called Photo 51 and was the significant piece to identifying the structure and symphony of DNA.

"We're wishing a happy birthday to British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, whose work was critical to our understanding of DNA and RNA and led to the innovation of the DNA double helix," Google announced via Google+.

Today's logo depicts Franklin in the second "O," staring through her X-ray tubes, which stand for the "G" at a double helix, representing the "l." The Google "e" is an image of what DNA looked like.

Franklin was the daughter of an rich British family who attended Newnham College and King's College. Her early areas of research were with coal, detailing its permeability.

It was her work that led to the use of coal as a fuel, as well as a filter for gas masks. Her work with coal was the basis for her theory, earning her a PhD from Cambridge University.

As a research associate at King's College London, Franklin was assigned to work with then-student Raymond Gosling. Her facts of chemistry and X-ray diffraction led to her photograph.

Her research and papers contributed to the understanding of the composition of both the A-DNA and B-DNA molecules as helices.

In later years, three other researches were approved information on Franklin's research. Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins later mapped the double helix. Their work earned them a Nobel Prize in 1962, four years after Franklin died of ovarian cancer.

Although best known for her work on mapping DNA, Franklin also used X-ray crystallography to study the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) and researched RNA, specially in regards to RNA viruses. While immensely sick and undergoing cancer treatment, Franklin and her research team produced 13 papers in the last two years leading up to her death in 1958.

Posthumously, Franklin has been familiar in a number of ways. King's College in London named a dormitory Rosalind Franklin Hall and an academic building named the Franklin-Wilkins building. The American National Cancer Institute recognized the Rosalind E. Franklin Award for Women in science. In 2004, The Chicago Medical School renamed its Finch University to the Rosalink Franklin University of Medicine and Science.