What’s changing, and why?
Chartbeat’s measurement javascript uses first-party cookies (unless it is configured in cookieless mode, in which case no cookies are used) to enable us to measure user behavior over time, enabling features such as visitor loyalty metrics. Historically, Chartbeat has set its cookies to be scoped on the specific subdomain where our code is running: for example, a user visiting subdomain1.site.com and subdomain2.site.com would be assigned two different cookies, one scoped to each subdomain. Because most customers make minimal use of subdomains, this has had little effect on our tracking.
However, as Chartbeat has pushed to expand our analysis of user behavior, including adding conversion tracking and attribution capabilities, this methodology has become problematic because user navigation between subdomains is frequently a critical part of their user journey toward conversion. Given that, we are planning to make an update to our measurement javascript that will cause cookies to be scoped by default to the root domain (for example .site.com rather than subdomain.site.com). Note that this change will not affect the number, names, or type of cookies being set. This change is scheduled to be deployed June 1 at roughly 9 pm ET.
There is no need for any update in your code. After the change, users will be uniquely identified across subdomains, so if your site makes heavy use of subdomains you may see shifts in the following site-wide metrics:
- Unique visitors
- New/Returning/Loyal users
- Quality clicks
- Loyal visitor pageviews
If for some reason (detailed below) you wish for cookies to remain scoped to the specific subdomain, we have introduced a new configuration variable which will retain the current behavior. Documentation on this variable, called the cookieDomain variable, can be found on our documentation site. Because our code change is scheduled for June 1 at 9 pm ET, we recommend you make any changes before that deadline.
Our Chartbeat tracked website uses multiple subdomains. How might we notice our Chartbeat data change after the cookie scope update?
Chartbeat tracked websites that use multiple subdomains may see…
- A decrease in unique visitor counts
- A shift in new/returning/loyal user counts
- An increase in loyal user pageviews
- An increase in quality clicks (across subdomains)
Under what circumstances should we consider adding the cookieDomain variable to our Chartbeat tracked site(s)?
Customers who have Chartbeat Sites dedicated to specific subdomains, indicating that they treat these subdomains as distinct brands or business units within their media portfolio, may wish to use our cookieDomain variable to leave cookies scoped to the subdomain instead of the root domain.
For example:
Let’s say I have three Chartbeat Sites on my account: mysite.com, newsbrand1.mysite.com, and newsbrand2.mysite.com. My company runs these two unique news brands under mysite.com subdomains, so we set these up as three unique Sites in our Chartbeat account because they have different audiences (with some overlap), and the sites are run by different teams at our organization.
If I do not add the cookieDomain variable to the Chartbeat code on our newsbrand1 and newsbrand2 pages before 06/01/2022, I can expect my new/returning/loyal user counts to shift up the funnel in these dashboards as our users’ loyalty now incorporates their visitation history to any and all mysite.com pages, including www.mysite.com, and both unique subdomains.
If my newsbrand 1 and 2 teams prefer to view visitor loyalty data in Chartbeat attributed only to user visits to pages under each specific subdomain (not counting these same users’ site visits to our other mysite.com brands), we should add the Chartbeat variable to all pages on both subdomains, like so:
For newsbrand1.mysite.com pages:
_sf_async_config.cookieDomain = “newsbrand1.mysite.com”
For newsbrand2.mysite.com pages:
_sf_async_config.cookieDomain = “newsbrand2.mysite.com”