• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 29, 2005

Consumers who report regularly deleting their cookies usually do so, stated aQuantive's Atlas Institute for Digital Marketing, which Thursday issued a partial retraction and revision of the report "Is the Sky Falling on Cookies?" released earlier this month.

More than four out of 10 consumers--43 percent--reported that they purged their computers of cookies weekly, according to both the original and revised report. The original version went on to state that the self-reported weekly-deleters typically kept cookies 45 days rather than seven. But the revised version concludes that the consumers' reported behavior is close to their real-world activity: 50 percent of those weekly-deleters did, in fact, erase their cookies at least weekly, 10 percent did so at least every two weeks, and 11 percent did so at least every month.

With the revised report, Atlas is much closer to a Jupiter Research study that shook up the online advertising world last month with the revelation that 39 percent of consumers say they delete cookies at least monthly.

Despite the deletions, the report, by Director of Analytics and Atlas Institute Young-Bean Song, states that cookies still are useful because most conversions occur within 24 hours of the click or impression. "Even in a future where users are deleting cookies once a week, cookie-based conversion reporting will capture a large majority of conversion activity," states the report.