Tracking Consent

Explains how to manage tracking consent for PureClarity to comply with legislation such as GDPR and CPPA

Peter Brooksbank avatar
Written by Peter Brooksbank
Updated over a week ago

As a personalisation platform, tracking a shoppers actions on your eCommerce store is one of the key ways PureClarity gathers the data required to segment your audience and show the right campaign and recommendations at the right time.

With the introduction of privacy focused legislation such as GDPR and CPPA, shoppers now have more control over their data. One of the key aspects of such legislation is that shoppers must opt-in to tracking by giving consent. This is most commonly given by clicking accept on the now ubiquitous cookie banners that feature on almost every site.

To aid our customers in complying with this legislation, PureClarity provides you with the option to require consent before we start tracking a shopper. This feature can be controlled via the Customer Privacy Settings. Note that extra work may be required if this feature is enabled, this is listed further down the page.

As PureClarity serves a global market, and not all of our clients do business that is impacted by this legislation, this option is turned off by default. If you do business in areas that fall under the legislation, we strongly encourage you to enable this feature to give your shoppers control of their data and to ensure you are in compliance with the regulations.

Note that BigCommerce customers do not need to change this setting within PureClarity, as we use the setting within BigCommerce itself for this purpose. As such, only the final section is relevant for BigCommerce customer.


Implementing Tracking Consent

To simplify implementation, PureClarity provides an event to call once a shopper provides tracking consent. The majority of cookie consent banners will provide a place to make event calls, once cookies have been accepted.

Once a shopper provides consent, make the following call:

_pc('accept_cookies', true);

This call instructs PureClarity to begin storing cookies and tracking the user.

As part of GDPR, shoppers are able to revoke cookie consent. If your platform or cookie banner implementation supports this, you can make the following call to PureClarity and the clientscript will remove our cookies:

_pc('accept_cookies', false);


Impact Of A Shopper Not Giving Tracking Consent

Once enabled, tracking consent will stop PureClarity from automatically adding new tracking cookies for shoppers. Once a shopper provides consent, PureClarity will begin tracking them.

Until a shopper gives tracking consent, there are a number of knock on effects to the shopper, until cookies are accepted:

  • Chat will not be available to the shopper

  • Recommendations will not be able to be personalised to the shopper, only general recommendations, such as Best Sellers, will be available

  • Campaigns that fall outside of segments such as "First Time Visitors" or "Everyone", will not be able to be shown to the shopper

  • Popups that fall outside of segments such as "First Time Visitors" or "Everyone", will not be able to be shown. As tracking is used to determine what popups have already been shown, shoppers who do not consent will only see one popup

  • The shoppers behaviour will not be reflected in the analytics as without tracking we are unable to map the clickthroughs to conversion.

This is because, without tracking cookies, PureClarity will see the shopper as a new person on every page they visit. Once a shopper consents to tracking, then all activity that occurred on that page visit will be tied to the shopper.

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