Onetrust/ Cookiepro categories
Understanding Cookie Categories with OneTrust
OneTrust, a leading platform in data privacy and consent management, provides a comprehensive way to classify and manage cookies on your website. Its one of the harder platforms to implement due to its complexity and power.
One thing that is confusing are the default categories.
1. Strictly Necessary Cookies (ID C0001)
These cookies are fundamental for the website's operation. Without these cookies, services like shopping carts and e-billing cannot function. For instance, if a visitor places items into a shopping cart and this activity isn’t recorded due to the absence of strictly necessary cookies, they would lose their selected items upon navigation to other pages.
Learn more about strictly necessary cookies here.
2. Performance Cookies (ID C0002)
Performance cookies gather information about how visitors use a website, such as the pages they visit most often and if they receive error messages from web pages. These cookies could collect information that identifies a visitor. A common example is Google Analytics.
3. Functional Cookies (ID C0003)
Functional cookies allow a website to remember choices you make (such as your username, language, or the region you are in) and provide enhanced, more personal features. For instance, these cookies enable services such as local news or weather reports. They can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts, and other parts of web pages that you can customize.
Learn more about the types of functional cookies.
4. Targeting Cookies (ID C0004)
These cookies collect information about your browsing habits to make advertising more relevant to you and your interests. They are also used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement and help measure the effectiveness of the advertising campaign. Advertisers will most often place these cookies on the website with the website operator’s permission.
5. Social Media Cookies (ID C0005)
Social media cookies are used when you share information using a social media sharing button or ‘like' button on our sites, or when you engage with our content on or through a social site, such as Facebook or Twitter. These cookies collect information about your social media interaction and any engagement activities on our sites.
Creating New Cookie Categories
OneTrust also provides the flexibility to create custom categories to fit specific needs. This is useful if your website employs cookies that don’t fall strictly into the pre-defined categories mentioned above. Customization helps in more precise tracking and consent management, ensuring compliance and enhanced user trust.
This is why you get C0007 and C00010. I found a C0007 category and spent ages trying to work out what it was. Its just a made up category specific to that site.
Categorizing Unknown Cookies
Cookies that don't fall into predefined categories need to be manually categorised. This can be done with the help of your developers, third-party vendors, or by researching via sources like Google.
For more detailed guidelines on cookie categorization with OneTrust, you can refer to Domain-Level Cookie Categorization.
Understanding and correctly categorising cookies is not just about compliance; it’s about improving the user experience on your website by respecting user privacy. Realistically, you only need C0001, C0002, C0003 and C0004. I have never seen C0005 in the wild and the C0007 I saw was made up.
This is all the more important with consent mode v2.
Ben has a BEng (Hons) in Computer Science and 20 years of experience in online marketing, specialising in SEO, lead generation and affiliate marketing. After spending over a decade as an igaming affiliate, he has decided to concentrate on GA4 training and SEO Audits.