Re: Popups and exit traffic
DENISE TURNEY <RCampb3422_at_aol.com> WROTE:
>Wouldn't a site have to place a cookie on your system to
>know you'd visited their page before and not have a pop-up
>ad come up when you visited a 2nd, 3rd, etc. time?
TO WHICH BRANDI JASMINE <brandi_at_brandijasmine.com> REPLIED:
> Yes.
In a perfect world where all machines were assigned one IP
number this would work. However in the real world we are in,
this is an utter failure. Reason being is that IP numbers
assigned to users going through most ISPs change. Or if
your using AOL, your behind a gateway or firewall which
masks your IP address.
The only way to track a user successfully is to use a
cookie. I looked up Coremetrics and if it's the Coremetrics
I went to that your talking about, I'm afraid that they
use cookies and they don't mention any other technology.
Here's an excerpt from their site:
How Do We Collect Information?
A "cookie" is used to collect information from your
browser
The nice thing is that they do have an opt-out. So all
Coremetrics (www.coremetrics.com) really does is data
mine what information they can get. I think the cookie
is the best way to keep track of a customer. I use
encrypted cookies for site access. They are ideal for
keeping track of what you send to a user. Sure people
say that cookies are the minions of Satan, but I'm going
to use them anyways. They can always shut them off.
On the other hand. You can put the session ID in the url
and have the server translate it. That's easy to do with
Apache. However it does make for a bit of work on the
web pages. All the URLs must contain the ID
(i.e. http://www.foo.com/members/<some encrypted id>/whatever).
Cheers,
Jamie Krasnoo
Freelance Perl/CGI/mod_perl Programmer
Received on Tue Jun 19 2001 - 11:36:31 CDT
