Storage

We need storage to safe identifiers and meta data for tracking.

Cookies

Harvest uses first party cookies. Whenever a user does an interaction with the website, the expiration timers will reset.

harvest_user

The harvest_user cookie contains all meta data about a user which needs to be persisted. The main variable is the userID which makes it possible to link all events to a single user.

Expiration is after 730 days of inactivity. (2 years) (Can be changed)

harvest_session

The harvest_session cookie contains all meta data about a session which needs to be persisted. The main variable is the sessionID which makes it possible to link all events to a single session.

Expiration is after 30 minutes of inactivity. (Can be changed)

harvest_user_meta

This cookie contains th extra meta information you added by calling the function harvest.setUserMeta.

Expiration is the same as the harvest_user cookie.

harvest_session_meta

This cookie contains th extra meta information you added by calling the function harvest.setSessionMeta.

Expiration is the same as the harvest_session cookie

harvest_collect_debug

This cookie stores the type of debugging. For more information about debugging, read our debugging documentation.

Expiration is after 730 days of inactivity. (2 years)

Local storage

We keep a minimal user profile in local storage. This helps us with doing attribution. The user profile is stored in local storage, because storing it in a cookie would result in a lot of data overhead in HTTP requests.

Note: Local storage is scoped to the protocol. This means that https://www.graindataconsultants.com does not have the same local storage as http://www.graindataconsultants.com.

We store the following information:

  1. Previous funnelstep
  2. Last clicked product list
  3. Last clicked promotion

For more information about the product list and promotion attribution, read our product list and promotion attribution documentation.

For more information about how we handle previous funnelsteps, read our previous funnelstep documentation.

harvest_user

The harvest_user item in local storage saves the variables mentioned above on user level. Which means that if a session is terminated, the information in this local storage item is preserved.

harvest_session

The harvest_session item in local storage saves the variables mentioned above on session level. Which means that if a session is terminated, the information in this local storage item is deleted.