[Product Release] Cross-Domain: optimization without borders

More and more marketers are working with several domain names. This means you have to manage cross-domain user journeys. And it's a problem, you can't track users across different domains because they were identified with cookies specific to each domain… This technological barrier prevents marketers from leveraging their users’ data to create personalized experiences taking into account their entire journey. Well, it's not a problem anymore! Our R&D team at Kameleoon came up with a new technology enabling marketers to track, analyze and personalize their users' journeys wherever they are. After launching the first Smart WYSIWYG Editor, solving the Mixed Group Problem and developing the first 100% flicker-free script on the market, we are thrilled to announce that Kameleoon can now handle cross-domain user journeys!

Why cross-domain technology is a big deal

Cross-domain allows you to follow your users journeys from end to end, even if they go through several domains, as long as Kameleoon’s script is installed on all of them.

Let's see what it would look like with an example

Say you wanna go to New York. You go to a travel website to book your trip (we'll use promovacances.com here). As the site has numerous subdomains (promovacances.com, ski.promovacances.com, hotel.promovacances.com, etc.), your user journey will necessarily be cross-domain. Thanks to Kameleoon, Promovacances’ teams were able to recognize you switching from one subdomain to another and to personalize your entire experience. Promovacances can then offer you and all its users the most relevant products or services all along your visit across the different subdomains. As of today, Kameleoon is able to bridge the gap between your different domains and to give you a unique vision of your users’ journey. The aim is to expand the navigational data you have to create personalized experiences for your users.

Relevancy is the name of the game

Another good example of a cross-domain journey is mobile operator Orange with its low-cost brand Sosh. When a user wants to log in on sosh.fr, he is automatically redirected to one of Orange’s subdomains. With Kameleoon’s cross-domain technology, they can fully leverage their user data and improve greatly the relevancy of their content and offers.

OK. But how does it really work?

Spoiler alert: Geeks only

To develop this cross-domain technology, Kameleoon’s R&D team has decided to use local storage and not cookies.

Why local storage?

There is one big disadvantage with cookies: their limited storage. Cookie storage is limited to 4096 bytes whereas local storage has 5MB per domain. So if you use cookies, the more data you want to store in your visitors’ browsers, the more cookies you'll need to create. Another problem with cookies is they are sent to the server at each HTTP request (opening a web page, loading a picture, a stylesheet, a JavaScript file, etc.). Each new cookie increases then the number of requests and slows down your website, deteriorating the user’s experience. This is even more critical in a cross-domain user journey. People will switch back and forth between the different domains, multiplying HTTP requests and accumulating cookies in the their browser. In contrast, local storage caches your data without implicating the server. This has 3 immediate benefits: navigation is more fluid, your users' data can be retrieved instantly when they log back on and their information will be stored when they log out.

Personalization knows no (digital) bounds anymore

Thanks to this innovation, you can now create tailored experiences for your users along their entire journey even if it takes them on several domains. Kameleoon users: don’t hesitate to ask your customer success manager about our cross-domain technology and see what it could do for you. And if you’re not a customer yet, we'd more than happy to give you demo! 2016 was an amazing year for Kameleoon especially rich in innovations and we promise to do even better in 2017. So stay tuned, we're just getting started!