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Is it possible to get demographic and interest information from DoubleClick cookies?
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We use Google Analytics and we are currently extracting information from the Google Analytics cookies about our visitors.
Is it possible to access DoubleClick cookies in a similiar fashion and get some demographic/interest information for each visitor to our website (if they have a DoubleClick cookie set)? If so, any information on how to retrieve it would be very appreciated.
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I wanted to get this information on my server by parsing out the double click cookie using javascript. Is this possible?
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I believe this is exactly what I was looking for. I will test it out this week.
Thank you very much Paul!
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This functionality was built directly into Google Analytics back in October, William. By changing a line in your on-page tracking code to use the Doubleclick js instead of the regular ga.js, you can pull the demo/interest info into your Google Analytics automatically.
You change this line...
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
to this...
ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://' : 'http://') + 'stats.g.doubleclick.net/dc.js';
A couple of things to note:
- the biggie! This functionality is only available in the classic Analytics. It hasn't yet been enabled in Universal Analytics, so if you want to use it, you'll need to stick with the classic version.
- you must also modify your site's Privacy Policy to indicate how this additional data will be used
- you'll need to turn on Enable Demographics and Interest Reports in Property Settings
- this change will also allow you to create and collect data for Remarketing campaigns
Once you've made the above changes, you should go to Audience > Demographics > Age to validate the code and confirm that the change has been successful.
That what you were looking for?
Paul
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