Server cookies

Since the release of ITP 2.1 first party cookies expire after 7 days. This has major impact on how we can do web analytics. If a user does not visit the website for more than 7 days, the user cookie will be expired.

That means that Harvest will have to generate a new user ID and this means in web analytics that we are unable to link user behavior of that visitor together.

To overcome this issue, we have to save the user cookie from the server instead of from Harvest Collect, which is Javascript.

To implement this, you will need to make use of our CNAME sub domain solution.

If you have implemented this, from the Harvest Pipeline we can set our harvest_user cookie from the server. This means that the expiration is not limited to 7 days.

We can then use this cookie in the Harvest Store, but we can also combine this with server side Google Analytics tracking.