What are cookies and how can they be used to generate leads?

What are cookies?

'Cookies’ are simple text files planted by your website on your prospects’ computer / mobile device. Only your website or the server it lives on can retrieve or read the contents of those cookies.

Cookies allow your website to remember things like:

  • Your customers’ login details
  • What country you’re your visitors are viewing your site
  • What pages they’ve visited in the past

However, they can’t find out your prospects' contact information, just their IP address and their past behaviour on that specific website


How can cookies be used to generate leads?

Ultimately they can’t on their own. Although data is collected on every action your prospects’ take on your website, cookies are not associated with your prospects’ name and email address.

In order to generate leads you need to capture your visitors’ name and email address through the use of sign-up forms. It is this personal information that, when added to the behavioural cookie data, gives you the complete picture – ie. not only giving you your prospects’ activity on your website but also their name and contact details.

In order to persuade your prospects to hand over their name and email address and other personal details, you need to offer irresistible content that your prospects must have. This is called inbound content marketing, more information on which can be found in our recent blog on the subject, here.


Why do websites have them?

There are a number of reasons why websites use cookies;

Technical reasons: They make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier e.g. without them it would think you are a new visitor every time you move to a new page and ask you for your login information over and over again!

Functional reasons: They record information about choices you’ve made and allow sites to tailor the content to you e.g. location preferences if you are looking for a shop or restaurant

Performance reasons: They let website owners know how many visitors use the site, which pages have been visited, how long visitors stay and what the bounce rate is in order that user experience can be improved.

Behavioural advertising reasons: Cookies enable websites to present advertising that is tailored to visitors based on their location and the content that interests them.


Can I switch them off?

There are a number of ways that you can turn cookies off by modifying your browser settings so that it:

  • Notifies you when it receives cookies or
  • Refuses them altogether
  • Will erase all existing cookies on your computer.


If you are looking for help with lead generation or with your broader digital marketing strategy please call Waypoint on Winchester 01962 862760 or email info@waypointdigitalmarketing.com