The Role of Functional Cookies

Functional cookies are essential tools that enable specific website features, such as sharing content on social media, gathering user feedback, and integrating other third-party services. They are designed to improve the user experience by remembering choices and enabling interactions.

For instance, professional networking site LinkedIn uses cookies to manage its infrastructure and user preferences. The ‘lidc’ cookie helps select the most efficient data center for a user, while ‘li_gc’ stores consent choices for using non-essential trackers. Similarly, video platforms like YouTube rely on a suite of cookies—such as ‘yt-remote-device-id’ and ‘yt-remote-cast-installed’—to remember a user’s video player settings and preferences within embedded content.

How Analytical Cookies Provide Insight

Analytical cookies help website owners understand visitor behavior by collecting data on key metrics. This information includes the number of visitors, the bounce rate, and the sources of web traffic, providing valuable insights into site performance and user engagement.

Google Analytics is a prominent user of these cookies. It sets the ‘_ga’ cookie to calculate visitor and session data, assigning a random number to identify unique users anonymously, while other cookies like ‘_ga_*’ are used to store and count page views. Analytics services like Hotjar also deploy their own cookies, such as ‘_hjSessionUser_*’, to ensure that data from multiple visits is correctly linked to a single user ID, helping to build a more accurate picture of how people interact with the site over time.