Oracle Eloqua asynchronous tracking scripts

Important: As a result of the Chrome 85 Release, Oracle Eloqua tracking will only capture the domain name and not the full path of the URL that was visited (unless your web team already has an explicit referrer policy in place on your website that allows the full URL to be shared) for any visitors who access your website via Chrome 85. See this product notice to learn more about recommended actions and FAQ.

The Oracle Eloqua asynchronous tracking scripts allow you to track visits to your website seamlessly without affecting the page load time for your visitors.

When you visit a website with the Oracle Eloqua asynchronous tracking scripts deployed, cookies are placed in your browser. Cookies help identify you as a website visitor according to your specific browser and computer combination in the event that you return to this domain. As visitors browse your website, Oracle Eloqua uses cookies and the visitor's IP address to build a visitor record. Learn more about visitor records. Oracle Eloqua cookies remain in the browser until the visitor deletes them or for 13 months.

First vs third-party cookies

Oracle Eloqua supports two types of cookie based tracking: third-party and first-party. The difference between third-party cookies and first-party cookies lies in the owner of the cookie.

A third-party cookie is a cookie that has a domain that is different than the domain being visited. A first-party cookie is a cookie that has a domain that is the same as the domain being visited. For example, if you visited example.com, and you saw a cookie for eloqua.com on your browser, this is a third-party cookie because the cookie does not belong to the example.com domain.

Popularity of third-party cookies is declining because they are:

Blocked by anti-spyware applications
Blocked by browsers and default privacy settings

First-party cookies are less problematic to use as they are blocked less often. It is difficult to browse the internet without accepting first-party cookies as these cookies identify you as a returning user to the site and help personalize your browsing experience. However, it is not possible to use a first-party cookie to track a single visitor’s digital body language across multiple domains owned by your organization.

Note: To enable first-party cookie support, please log in to My Oracle Support and create a service request. Review this knowledge base article for more information on what to include in your request.

Executing tracking scripts

In order to ensure the highest probability that Oracle Eloqua can track the page before the visitor leaves it, the tracking scripts are executed after the entire Document Object Model (DOM) is loaded, but before all content is loaded in all browsers (except IE8 and below). The DOM specifies how the objects in a web page are represented, what attributes are associated with each object, and how the objects and attributes can be manipulated. While the DOM is a standard, different browsers support different levels of the DOM and JavaScript standards. For IE8 and below, the entire page must be loaded before requests to the Oracle Eloqua servers are made, they do not support the event that indicates that the DOM has been completely loaded.