First-party vs third-party data, explained

First-party data is information you collect directly, on your own domain, from your own customers: their orders, their sessions, the click that brought them in. Third-party data is collected by someone else, often through cookies set on domains other than the one the visitor is on, and shared or sold across sites.

Why the distinction suddenly matters

Browsers have spent years dismantling third-party cookies. Safari and Firefox block them by default, and the broader industry is moving the same way. Tracking that depends on third-party cookies is steadily going dark. First-party data, set on your own domain, is not affected the same way and has become the reliable foundation for measurement.

What it means for attribution

Attribution built on third-party cookies loses the thread as those cookies disappear. Attribution built first-party keeps working. That is why modern tracking captures the click id in a first-party cookie on your own domain and reports conversions server-side.

Trakt is first-party by design: it records the click and session on your domain and never depends on third-party cookies to tie a sale back to the ad that earned it.