How are anonymous visitors tracked?

Marketing Cloud Personalization tracks all visitors, both known and anonymous, by placing a first-party cookie in their browser upon their first visit to a tracked site. This cookie contains a unique, randomly generated alphanumeric identifier, often referred to as the UUID. This allows the platform to build a profile of the visitor's activities and preferences over time, even before they have been identified through an action like logging in or providing an email address. This method is robust against the increasing browser restrictions on third-party cookies.

A. Marketing Cloud Personalization uses a first-party cookie for primary tracking, not a third-party cookie, to ensure persistence and comply with modern browser privacy standards.

B. The platform automatically assigns the identifier; the customer's responsibility is to deploy the tracking code (Beacon), not to assign the ID itself.

C. The browser does not assign the tracking identifier; the Marketing Cloud Personalization JavaScript running on the site assigns it.

1. Salesforce Help, Marketing Cloud Personalization, Cookies and Data Collection in Marketing Cloud Personalization. Section: "First-Party Cookies". It states, "When a user first visits your website, Personalization assigns a unique, randomly generated ID to the user."

2. Salesforce Help, Marketing Cloud Personalization, Marketing Cloud Personalization Security and Privacy Guide. Section: "Data Collection". This guide details the use of first-party cookies for collecting user data and assigning a unique visitor ID.