Changes to First Party Data Collection

Acoustic sets cookies for Digital Analytics to capture visitor and session information that is used for reporting. Browser changes across Chrome and Firefox earlier in the year introduced new practices for collecting cookie values across domains, especially in cases where different domains create a 3rd party cookie experience.

An example: Let's say you have multiple websites - acoustic.com, myacoustic.com, goacoustic.com and learnacoustic.com. Because the same visitor might navigate across the different websites, but your data collection site is www3.acoustic.com for all sites and visitor and session cookies are set under that domain. This always would have been treated as a 3rd party cookie domain, but would allow you to use the same cookie domain across all websites. 

Visitors who have set their browsers to prohibit 3rd party cookies would not be tracked. The recent browsers updates (Chrome 84, Safari) treat the above scenario as a 3rd party cookie for all domains except acoustic.com and will block setting 3rd party cookies. The result in your analytics is that the other browsers will have an increase in anonymous traffic, since no visitor cookie can be set.

Two options exist to remedy the situation created by the browser changes:

1. Move to Client Managed First Party Data Collection: Digital Analytics historically has supported two types of data collection -- Client Managed and Acoustic Managed. Moving to Client Managed will allow the Acoustic SDK to set cookies under the page domain, making them first party. The Acoustic SDK also provides a means to transfer the cookie values to other, dissimilar domain pages. 
    
2. Add the SameSite=none, secure attributes to the cookies set by the data collection domain.  Setting the SameSite, secure attributes cookies set under one domain to be read by the other, dissimilar domains as long as those domain pages use the https protocol. For pages using the http protocol, no solution is possible for the reading of these cookies. Read more about SameSite cookies here.  Work with Acoustic to set samesite=none, while also specifying 'secure' to ensure cookies have a secure context.

Moving to Client Managed first party data collection is the safest, most flexible and secure way to read cookies across domains. Making this switch would have a short term impact to new & repeat visitors as it would reset all visitors against the new data collection domain. New & repeat visitor counts would return to normal over time. 

Contact support if you need assistance to implement one of the above measures.