Data and infrastructure
A cookie is a small file a website leaves in the visitor's browser, so it can recognise them on the next visit and reconstruct the path they took.
It carried online advertising measurement for twenty years and carries less of it today: browsers now restrict cookies set by parties other than the site being visited, so measurement shifts onto the data a company collects itself. Anyone reading an advertising dashboard today is reading an estimate, and it is worth knowing that before taking it into a meeting. In Europe cookies are governed by Directive 2002/58/EC on privacy in electronic communications (known as ePrivacy), amended in 2009 by Directive 2009/136/EC, the so-called cookie law: apart from strictly necessary technical cookies, a cookie may be placed only with the visitor's consent, which is where consent banners come from. In Italy the data protection authority, the Garante, updated its guidelines in 2021, requiring among other things that refusing be as easy as accepting.
An example
An online store sees a hundred conversions in the ad platform dashboard and sixty attributed orders in its management system. The gap has several causes at once, from cookies lost between one device and another to attribution windows the platform sets by itself (the period within which an order still counts as the effect of an ad), and the useful question is which of the two numbers goes into the commercial review, and who owns that gap.
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