**PLEASE NOTE SUPPORT FOR FIRST-PARTY COOKIES IS AVAILABLE ONLY AS PART OF AN OPEN BETA PROGRAM. CONTACT ORACLE ELOQUA PRODUCT SUPPORT TO REQUEST ACCESS.*
The Eloqua asynchronous tracking scripts allow you to track visits to your website seamlessly and without affecting the page load time for your visitors. They are supported and tested in all major browsers, including:
- Internet Explorer 6+
- Firefox 1.5+
- Opera 9+
- Safari 3+
- Chrome
In order to ensure the highest probability that Eloqua tracks the page before the visitor decides to leave the page or move on to another, the scripts are executed after the entire Document Object Model (DOM) is loaded, but before all content is loaded in all browsers (except IE8 and below). The DOM is the specification for how objects in a Web page are represented (e.g. images, headers, links, etc.), and defines what attributes are associated with each object, as well as how the objects and attributes can be manipulated. While the DOM is a standard, different browsers support different levels of the DOM and Javascript standards. IE8 and below do not support the event that indicates when the DOM has been completely loaded, and for those browsers, the entire page is loaded before requests to the Eloqua servers are made.
Visitors are remembered based on a cookie value stored in their browser. There are two types of cookies: first-party and third-party. How they are tracked in Eloqua varies from one to the other.
In the case of third-party cookies, upon the first request to a tracked website made by the visitor, a cookie with the .eloqua.com domain is created and populated with a unique identifier, even if the website is not on the eloqua.com domain. This unique identifier (GUID) does not contain any information about the visitor, and is only used to correlate return visits by the same visitor. Unless the visitor clears cookies from the browser, this GUID remains constant and will continue to track his or her online activity.
However, as is already the case with the Safari browser on Apple’s iOS platform, Mozilla, Microsoft and Google may also consider blocking third-party cookies by default in Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome, respectively, in the near future. When this occurs, this would prevent Eloqua from being able to track a visitor’s digital body language. To get around this restriction, you as an Eloqua user can add tracking scripts to your web pages to enable first-party cookies as of the Fall ’13 release, with certain limitations,
For branded domains configured to support first-party cookies, it is possible to drop a first-party cookie on the visitor’s machine. If an existing third-party cookie already exists on that machine, its GUID is used for the first-party cookie in order for Eloqua to continue to capture the visitor’s activity (digital body language). If no third-party cookie exists, a first-party cookie with a unique GUID is dropped on the visitor’s machine.
The following are now supported (previously unsupported in the Fall '13 release):
- Eloqua-hosted Landing Pages.
- Branded and non-branded domains.
- Secure websites (accessed via HTTPS:).
For the Winter '14 Eloqua release, the following limitations are still in effect:
- Strict Mode tracking is not supported.
- It is not possible to track digital body language across multiple domains, for example oracle.com and eloqua.com.
- For Winter '14, support for First-Party Cookies is available as part of an Open Beta program only. Contact Eloqua Product Support to request access.
See the attached PDF for more information on the tracking scripts and how this new technical limitation might affect your implementation of Eloqua.
Revision History:
24 February 2014: Version 2.2.1 adds statement about Opt-In and Opt-Out first- and third-party cookie tracking on page 21.