Tag and Cookies

A tag, also referred to as a "pixel," is a snippet of HTML/JavaScript code inserted into a web page’s content. It serves to collect information about the visitor’s session or mark specific events at a certain moment. When the web page loads, the embedded JavaScript code within the tag is executed, enabling the intended functionality or tracking to occur.

Tags can be positioned in different sections of the HTML code (e.g., header, body, footer) based on the tag’s requirements. By gathering data, tags facilitate precise visitor analysis and support crucial marketing initiatives aimed at customer retention and conversion.

A cookie is a group of data stored in text format on the visitor’s computer, defined with an expiration date and the domain, or group of pages to which the cookie applies. The data defined in the cookie provides a variety of functionalities, including maintaining session persistence on the site, saving visitor preferences, or preserving information about the visitor’s journey (e.g., items in the shopping cart).

Analytics Tags, among other digital marketing implementations, typically create and use cookies to uniquely identify and maintain visitor information.

CoreMedia’s Active TAG must be included in every page of the website in order to insure not only proper campaign execution, but also correct data register (visitor behaviour, statistics and the correct calculation of campaign performance).

Customer identification is done through the inclusion of javascript variables defined before the script call.

To ensure the smooth operation of the customer’s website and eliminate dependencies between services, it is essential that the CoreMedia Tag is hosted and served directly from the customer’s domain or a reliable Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Example if script hosted on client’s domain:

Example if script hosted on CDN:

The script’s version is mentioned on the top of it and generally it indicates the date of when it was first deployed. You will find below an example of the current version (v20230420a):

html /* * CoreMedia Webcare Script * http://www.byside.com * * v20230420a */

The script is static and therefore it remains in the browser’s cache. Its loading is only necessary upon the first access request. The script will be served in compressed format (gzip) and its size will be approximately 28,2KB (in version v20230420a). The suggested expiry time for the browser is 2 days.

CoreMedia recommends placing the TAG within the <HEAD`>` section of the page to ensure maximum data reliability. However, it can be included in any part of the DOM, as long as it is loaded before any CoreMedia functionality is called.

In public areas, CoreMedia’s visitor session identification is done by using a session cookie. In fact, as for any other analytics tool, this identification is associated to the visitor’s browser instead of the visitor itself. This means that if the same person uses two different browsers (ex.: home computer and work computer; computer and mobile phone; tablet and computer, and so on), to each browser will correspond a different visitor.

In private areas, post-login, it is possible to identify not only the browser’s session but also to associate this session to a unique visitor identification code. This allows us to be sure that, regardless of the device or browser in use, the visitor is unique.

In secure areas, CoreMedia makes it possible to personalize actions through a unique visitor id code. To do that it is necessary to add the variable "bysideWebcare_fid" to CoreMedia TAG.

The CoreMedia tag is primarily designed to operate on websites that perform a full page load each time a user navigates to a new page. However, many modern websites use technologies such as AJAX, React, Angular, or Vue to create Single-Page Applications (SPAs), where the content is dynamically updated without the need for a full page load. In these situations, an additional method is needed to ensure that the CoreMedia tag can effectively track user interactions.

To address these scenarios, CoreMedia provides a specialized JavaScript function: bysideWebcareTrackSubPage(). This function should be invoked each time a new "page" or view is loaded within your SPA.

The bysideWebcareTrackSubPage() function accepts two parameters:

WebSocket is a technology that allows bidireccional communication through full-duplex channels on a single socket (TCP). It was projected to be executed in browsers and web servers which support HTML5, but can be used by any application or application server.

In CoreMedia’s framework, they are used to improve accuracy in real time counting of the number of visitors viewing a particular page, as well as to allow certain types of direct interaction with those visitors (chat, remote assistance, and so on).

Here are a few considerations about the use of WebSockets:

In addition to the global GDPR privacy rules, the following classifications were established in 2012 with the introduction of European e-Privacy directives, which were adapted in Portugal through Law 46/2020 that has been in force since August 30 and can be consulted in "Diário da República", (Article 5):

Please be aware that the provided descriptions may vary depending on the specific context and are solely intended for illustrative purposes.

CoreMedia provides the following four levels of cookie classification:

CoreMedia campaigns can be made according to the CoreMedia client’s settings. These settings can be framed within the different levels of cookie management defined by the client, allowing campaigns to:

By default, CoreMedia service operates in "Opt-In" mode. In this mode, a "first-party" cookie ("byside_webcare_tuid") is created on the client’s domain with a visitor identifier that, during the lifetime of the cookie, allows the visitor to be recognized between visits.

If desired, CoreMedia can change this behavior and initiate sessions in "Opt-Out" mode (for example: session start until the client accepts the cookie policy). On each new visit, the visitor will be counted as a new visitor. To start the service in this mode, the CoreMedia tag must be loaded with the parameter "bysideWebcare_privacy = 1".

Example:

The method used to set cookies for new visitors ("var bysideWebcare_privacy = 1;") only impacts the creation of the visitor. After this moment, changing the cookie level is only possible through the function mentioned here ("bysideWebcare_setDoNotTrack").

Once the client accepts cookies, the following function must be called to allow the client to move to the respective cookie acceptance level (analytics):

The value [LEVEL] can be one of the following:

Onsite campaigns have a configuration available that allows restricting the presentation of elements by visitor type. As shown in the image below, it is possible to present the campaign only to anonymous visitor type, only to identified visitor type, or by default, to all visitors.

As anonymous visitors, we include visitors at the DO_NOT_TRACK level.

Visitors who have a FUNCTIONAL, PERSONALIZATION or TARGETING service level are included in the identified visitor type.

The CoreMedia service can, according to the privacy rules defined by each client, be used as a strategy to increase Opt-In levels. Regardless of the initial Opt-In level, the presentation of a Chat or Click2Call service, as an offer of contact/support with the customer, may request personal data (e.g. email and name) and require explicit acceptance of the "terms and conditions".

The content of the "terms and conditions", duly validated with the client’s legal department, should make it clear that by accepting the "terms and conditions", the visitor/customer will automatically be accepting the respective level of Cookies (which may vary according to the CoreMedia client’s privacy policy).

In this case, after acceptance of the "terms and conditions", the CoreMedia service may automatically:

CoreMedia service can thus be used as a strategy to increase Opt-In levels and manage first-party data of the client itself.

CoreMedia’s script is the result of the experience acquired through several years and was designed in order to minimize the negative impact that any content loading can cause in a website.

As a principle, priority is given to the base contents of the page. The contents managed by CoreMedia wait until these are loaded before starting their own loading process.

From our experience in giving support to service integration to various customers, we have verified that the majority of situations in which a loading delay is identified, it can be easily and efficiently solved by optimising other page elements (for example, multiple calls to Javascript files)

CoreMedia’s contents only start to be loaded after the base content of the page is loaded. Therefore, including the script at end of the page will not improve loading time.

On the other hand, loading inside the <HEAD`>` allows every CoreMedia functionality to be present in the entire page. In this case, for instance, there is no need to validate whether the script is already loaded before including a placeholder tag.

Loading in the <HEAD`>` has other advantage: the access to the page is registered earlier, therefore minimising the possibility of losing that access register due to a page change before the register takes place.

CoreMedia’s TAG should be present in very page of the website.

Given nature of the service, which has already been described earlier in this document, the function of the TAG is to collect all information needed to create visitor profiles and their statistics and to allow the insertion of dynamic content (campaigns). If the TAG is not present in one of the pages of the visitor journey, visit information is lost, as well as browsing information, and a new visit/session is created.

For the same reason that was stated in the previous topic, if the TAG is not in the homepage, all information about visit origin (for instance, the campaigns that originated the visit) is lost.

CoreMedia’s contents only initiate their loading after the page onLoad event, i.e. after base elements are loaded. This is in order to prioritise the base contents and minimize the impact on loading performance.

Therefore, if there is a delay in base content loading, this can cause an excessive delay on the loading of CoreMedia’s dynamic contents.

To address this type of issues we suggest the identification and solution of the base delay, namely the loading of heavy elements or slow services. In several cases, we have verified that the delays from third party scripts delay were affecting the loading time of CoreMedia’s contents.

CoreMedia’s script is optimised to minimize the impact on page loading time.

Taking the script off the homepage will cause the loss of information about how the visitors have arrived on the website (through a search engine, a link in other website, a promotional campaign, and so on) and generates incorrect information - the website’s homepage will be identified as the origin of many visits.

As a general principle, to give priority to page loading and improve visitor experience, all HTTP requests needed for the loading of dynamic contents are only launched after the page’s onLoad event (ie. after the base elements of the page have been loaded). This principle may lead to CoreMedia’s dynamic content being loaded with some delay. When this happens, it is necessary to identify what is causing the delay in the loading of the rest of the elements and consequently delaying the loading of CoreMedia’s contents.

To illustrate the functioning of CoreMedia’s script, we will use as an example the access to a basic website homepage, hosted in the domain "www.byside.com/tag/" containing a static placeholder. We will assume that the webcare_id associated to this website is the following: A82B12DB68.

First of all, we need to distinguish two usage situations:

The first situation has a bigger volume of HTTP requests than the second, as the this last one does not require so much information and uses browser cache.

CoreMedia’s TAG can be included in third-party Tag Managers that allow the inclusion of customisable HTML content.

The inclusion of CoreMedia’s TAG should be done as previously explained in the section "Deployment". It is compulsory to define the variables "webcare_id" (which identifies CoreMedia’s customer) and "lang" (which identifies page language). As an example, the following code should be included in the HTML field without any encoding.

A triggering rule should be created in order for the customised HTML TAG to be included in every page. This allows it to maintain normal active campaign execution, as well as the correct register of visitor behaviour data.

As mentioned earlier, there are certain limitations when loading CoreMedia TAG within Tag Managers. These limitations primarily affect parameter definition, inclusion of passive elements, and delayed requests for HTML content defined in the back office. Here are the potential constraints:

As an example, the following code shows the inclusion of placeholder tags that should be done after CoreMedia TAG.

In the page’s HTML code where the placeholder content should be inserted, there must be an element in the DOM with the identified ID, such as in the following example:

CoreMedia does not use third-party cookies! This means that the end of third-party cookies will not affect the CoreMedia service! The use of person-level identity and first-party data has always been part of the basic management of CoreMedia Marketing Cloud campaigns. We use first-party cookies, generated on our client’s domain, to identify visitors in channels where we do not have personal identification. For identified clients, we use a personal identifier (CoreMedia FID) that can be shared by first-party cookies or directly in data layers without the need for cookie usage.

The use of different identifiers (cookie ID, email address, customer number, etc.) allows CoreMedia, as a Customer Data Platform (CDP), to create a unified, cross-channel view of the customer that is synchronized with other marketing channels and systems.

This unified customer view allows CoreMedia to associate the personal CoreMedia ID with different internal and external platforms, such as Facebook and Google Marketing Platform, enabling the association of users and customers with different touchpoints, across all channels, online or offline.

In the CoreMedia backoffice, in the "Settings" > "Security" > "Data Privacy" area:

IPs

Transcript

Clear phone number after the end of the call:

Period of retention

Tracking