Cookies – Did you know your school’s website has a sweet tooth?

Continuing on the vein of my previous post on social media and web use in schools, this time around it’s cookies. Defined by Webster’s online dictionary as:

1   : a small flat or slightly raised cake

2   : a small file or part of a file stored on a World Wide Web user’s computer, created and subsequently read by a Web site server, and containing personal information (as a user identification code, customized preferences, or a record of pages visited)

Unfortunately for people like me who enjoy their cakes, this two article series is about the latter definition (wikipedia entry); what they are, and in the sequel article how you can utilise cookies in your e-marketing, as well as major legal changes which will require action from even the most basic of school websites.

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In their most basic sense, cookies are small pieces of data that are used as a way for a website to remember things, much like post-it note, and just as disposable.

Cookies were originally designed as a way of websites remembering items for a “shopping basket”, to be purchased. For example, when a pupil is looking on Amazon.co.uk to buy study guides to help with GCSE English, amazon’s website will create a cookie to recall what book they have decided to buy. If they then find another book to help with their algebra, amazon will create another cookie to remember this book as well. Finally, when our diligent pupil gets permission to buy the book from his parents, amazon will use these cookies to remember everything the pupil has decided to buy and put it into a list or “basket”, to put all the separate items together as one transaction.

This simplified process tells us that cookies are a great way of storing information about people using a website or online service. In the case of an e-commerce website like amazon, the website will use the cookies to remember what you want to buy, but when you have made the purchase, or exited the website, this information will be discarded, meaning you would have to re-enter it when you return.

Some websites use cookie data to create statistics that can inform their activity. Google analytics is an application which you can use with your current website to monitor how effective it is. Google analytics can tell you all kinds of information that is useful, from how many people view your website and for how long, to where their enquiries are coming from. This is great for schools looking to ensure effective marketing – how many people are viewing your website, for how long, which parts of the site are most viewed, etc. To do this, Google analytics is directly informed by cookies created every time someone is active on your website.

So cookies are useful in various activities, and enable quick recall, without the need for extensive databases or permanent information gathering.

Now the “but”…

Data can be used to log your activities online, such as what books you are interested in, as with our example above, cookies are open to use by organisations to gather buying trends and information about web user activity with high levels of precision. This has huge implications on privacy – who is watching what cookies you create online, and what are they using this for?

Luckily unless you know explicitly that you have google analytics or some other device within your website that collects this data, you are at absolutely no risk of compromising any user of your site. If in doubt, ask your web administrator.

However, the mere hint that there are organisations trying to capture data subversively has led to action at government level, and my next article will inform on what this means to your website, now that you have had your fill of cookies.

To find out more about our digital marketing courses or to book a place, please contact Chris Smith on 0843 308 7548, or email csmith@mtmconsulting.co.uk

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