Last Updated on 27/08/2025 by Arabella Brown
Are cookies important on a website?
At Icarus Marketing we are a small team with a large scope of clients across the globe. Our offices are based in the beautiful artisan town of Holywood in Northern Ireland.
We believe in accurate market research and design stunning well thought out websites with effective marketing campaigns. As a client led agency our marketing campaigns and web designs are fresh, innovative and original. Our goal is to see our clients do well with their digital assets and. campaigns and with over 45 active clients we’re keeping busy and pushing ourselves to stay ahead of the pack in a competitive industry for both ourselves and our clients. We like to keep our work up there with the latest trends and reliable data and will constantly refine websites, seo and the latest optimisation via our green hosting programmes.
Everyone has seen the website banners that ask you if you’ll allow cookies on your browser or not. But what exactly does this mean and what are these cookies? Well, to begin with, they are essential to the modern internet experience. A necessary part of browsing the web, cookies help web developers give you a more personal and convenient website visit. In short, cookies let websites remember you, your logins, shopping carts and more. But they can also be a treasure trove of private info and a serious vulnerability to your privacy.
What Are Internet Cookies?
Cookies (often known as internet cookies) are text files with small pieces of data — like a username and password — that are used to identify your computer as you use a network. Specific cookies are used to identify specific users and improve their web browsing experience. Data stored in a cookie is created by the server upon your connection. This data is labelled with an ID unique to you and your computer. When the cookie is exchanged between your computer and the network server, the server reads the ID and knows what information to specifically serve you.
What Are Cookies Used For?
Websites use HTTP cookies to streamline your web experiences. Without cookies, you’d have to login every time you leave a site or rebuild your shopping cart if you accidentally closed the page. Making cookies is an important part of the modern internet experience.
To be more concise, cookies are intended to be used for:
- Session management: For example, cookies let websites recognize users and recall their individual login information and preferences, such as sports news versus politics.
- Personalization: Customized advertising is the main way cookies are used to personalize your sessions. You may view certain items or parts of a site, and cookies use this data to help build targeted ads that you might enjoy. They’re also used for language preferences as well.
- Tracking: Shopping sites use cookies to track items users previously viewed, allowing the sites to suggest other goods they might like and keep items in shopping carts while they continue shopping on another part of the website. They will also track and monitor performance analytics, like how many times you visited a page or how much time you spent on a page.
The single most important job of a cookie is to keep a user logged in as they browse from page to page. A user’s browsing history becomes part of a database which the website then uses to improve the customer experience. Ecommerce sites use a combination of session cookies and persistent cookies to create a seamless shopping cart experience. As the user adds items to her cart, session cookies keep track of the items. If the user abandons the cart, persistent cookies will retrieve her selections from the database the next time she visits or allow you to create personalized retargeting campaigns that encourage her to revisit her cart. This is a huge help in encouraging conversions.
Cookies are an essential part of the Internet. Without them, webpages would be a great deal less useful and interactive. Ecommerce would be impossible. They give websites the ability to remember and improve.
If you would like our advice or to engage with us, please do contact us on projects@icaruscommunications.co.uk or contact owen@icaruscommunications.co.uk
