First domain tracking (Phoenix)
Last updated
Last updated
Phoenix reduce the impact of Safari ITP on your cookies.
The Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) feature of Safari browsers reduces the duration of most 1st party cookies to one day. ITP was initially implemented to reduce the effectiveness of cross domain visitor tracking—unfortunately it also has a strong impact on the user experience of website users. 1st party cookies are often used to store user settings of important features of a website.
e.g. cookie banner use 1st party cookies to store consent settings of a website visitor. On Safari these cookies might only last for one day. Thus cookie banner show up on almost any consecutive website visit, asking the visitor for his privacy settings again and again.
Phoenix enables you to persist 1st party cookies for longer durations to reduce the impact of ITP on your website and business.
To understand how Phoenix works it is important to understand following cookie concepts.
Phoenix allows to persist 1st party cookies without a Secure and HttpOnly flag.
After Phoenix is set up on a website domain it will backup selected 1st party cookies that are affected by ITP by storing them in Secure Http cookies that are not affected by ITP.
Phoenix will check if a 1st party cookie was deleted and recreate it from its backup on further website visits. Therefore the 1st party cookie is not anymore affected by ITP.
Phoenix setup consists of following steps. A Commanders Act consultant will support you during setup.
Phoenix has to run on your website domain to be able to create Secure Http cookies. Therefore you will need to assign a subdomain of your domain (e.g. phoenix.mydomain.com) to Phoenix.
In case you want to activate Phoenix for multiple domains (e.g. two domains, one .com for an English site and .fr for a French site.) you need to create one subdomain per domain.
Your administrator can configure your Phoenix subdomains in your Commanders Act interface under Admin > Domain Management.
Browsers, like Safari, can usually store a maximum of 8 kB of cookie data per domain. Web servers also have a cookie data limit, often matching the 8 kB of browsers.
Your administrator can configure how much cookie space he wants to make available for Phoenix in your Commanders Act interface under Admin > Domain Management. It is recommended to not exceed 2 kB, and we suggest a limit below 0.5 kB during initial setup.
Exceeding cookie storage limit can make your website inaccessible. Please consult with your technical teams during setup to define an optimal storage quota for Phoenix.
You will then need to connect your Phoenix subdomains with the Phoenix service. Your domain administrator needs to therefore declare the tracking domain in Cloudflare, or your WAF, that point your Phoenix subdomains (e.g. phoenix.mydomain.com) to the Phoenix service domain (e.g. sitexxx.commander5.com).
If you have any questions about how to configure your reverse proxy, check this dedicated documentation
Your administrator can find the Phoenix service domain in your Commanders Act interface under Admin > Domain Management.
You have to re-generate your web containers (Commanders Act TMS) after enabling Phoenix.
Commanders Act cookies are automatically managed by Phoenix. Cookies of other vendors have to be configured manually.
In TMS Commanders Act, cookies are usually set by your vendor tags. You can enable Phoenix for selected tags in the "Deployment" step of your Commanders Act TMS container by enabling the ITP BYPASS option. This will automatically persist all cookies of this tag with Phoenix. A progress bar will show the remaining cookie space made available by your administrator.
Please contact the Commanders Act support or your Commanders Act consultant in case the ITP BYPASS option is not available for a tag or cookie you would like to persist.
Please contact your Commanders Act consultant in case you would like to persist cookies outside of Commanders Act TMS or in case you would like to install Phoenix without Commanders Act TMS.
