We do not track any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) by default, and we use first-party cookies to identify individual users. 


Since we only use first-party cookies (cookies stored under your site name), we do not track user behavior across our different customer accounts. We do make an exception to this in cases where you may have multiple properties and are interested in Cross-site recommendations, which can be done via third-party tracking. Even if you do opt-in to using these third-party cookies for cross-domain, the third-party tracking information is not essential to our recommendation engine and our core recommendation engine will work correctly for users who have blocked third-party cookies.


First-Party Cookies


By default, all our cookies are first-party cookies stored under your domain name, and are therefore shared between your subdomains. If your privacy policy or legal regulations require that cookies across subdomains be different, please get in touch with us.


Our cookies include semi-permanent user-level cookies and more temporary session-level cookies.


_igThis is the randomly generated UUID we use to identify a unique user. It's also used by our A/B test slicing, and you can change this value from the client side with the function $p("setUserId", "example_id").
_igtRandomly generated string to identify a unique session a user is in.



In addition to cookies, we may also store some information temporarily in local storage under your domain, primarily in order to send data in a delayed manner. For instance, we store click activities in local storage so that they can be sent to our servers on the next page load, then delete the activities from local storage.


Activity Data Parameters


You can access all events sent to query.petametrics.com using the Network panel in your browser's Developer Tools. if you click on any"__activity.gif" event you can dig deeper into the request headers.


By default, we send three events to query.petametrics.com/__activity.gif associated with every pageview for each user.

  • pageview: This is sent immediately upon our Javascript being loaded.
  • stuck_10s: This is sent after you have been on the page for 10 seconds.
  • stuck_3m: This is sent after you have been on the page for 3 minutes.

When you start pulling and showing recommendations from us, there’ll be additional activity events recording when our recommendations get shown, seen, and clicked. 


The "Query String Parameters" section of each activty.gif includes the parameters in the query in a human-readable form and form the bulk of the data collected. These parameters are described below.


Parameters that vary with each event:

  • e is the type of event. In the example above, it is "pageview". The other possibilities are stuck_10s and stuck_3m (for heartbeat events) and some types associated with widget tracking.
  • sppx (not sent by default, but can be turned on) is the pixels scrolled by the user so far. It is 0 if the user has not scrolled at all. For the event of type pageview this is likely to be 0, since it is fired immediately upon the page loading.
  • sppc (not sent by default, but can be turned on) is the percentage of the page the user has scrolled.

Parameters that are the same for all events within the same pageview, but differ across pageviews:

  • pvid is a unique ID generated for each pageview. It is common between all events within a pageview, but different across pageviews.
  • cu is the current URL of the page.
  • ccu is the current canonical URL of the page.
  • ct is the current title of the page.
  • ref is the referrer to the current pageview.

Cookie-based parameters that are the same for all events within the same session (i.e., until the user closes the browser):

  • sid is the session ID, and corresponds to the value _igt in the cookie.

Cookie-based user-level parameters (see our section on cookies for more):

  • uid is the user ID, and corresponds to the value _ig in the cookie.

Parameters that are based on browser, device, and system settings (these are generally constant for a given user):

  • ua is user agent.
  • l is the language set by the user in his or her browser.
  • os is the user’s operating system.
  • scd (not sent by default, but can be turned on) is the user’s screen color depth.
  • scrh (not sent by default, but can be turned on) is the user’s screen height.
  • scrw (not sent by default, but can be turned on) is the user’s screen width.
  • ihei (not sent by default, but can be turned on) is the user’s inner height.
  • iwid (not sent by default, but can be turned on) is the user’s inner width.
  • dh (not sent by default, but can be turned on) is the document height.

Parameters that are based on the loading and timing details:

  • ts (not sent by default, but can be turned on) is the timestamp from the client's side, as an epoch timestamp.
  • tspl is the time since page load, in milliseconds.
  • blst is the time since page load, in milliseconds.
  • ist is the start time of the execution of the initialization of the LiftIgniter JS file.
  • iet is the end time of the execution of the initialization of the LiftIgniter JS file.
  • tzo is the timezone offset of the user from UTC.

The parameter jsv  is the version of LiftIgniter JS file in the form of the date that the JS file was released.

Although the user’s IP address is not passed as a query string parameter, it is included with the request. We use the IP address to extract information about the user’s location (country, city, and postal code). 

We do not store the IP address in logs after extracting the user's location.

Additionally, any petametrics.com cookies are sent with the request, but no petametrics.com cookies should be getting set for users who do not directly visit subdomains under petametrics.com.