How do AB Tasty cookies work?

AB tasty uses first-party cookies that are defined by the URL of the website using AB Tasty. 
Cookies enable AB Tasty to work properly and guarantee campaign reliability by recognizing a visitor as unique each time they visit the website (AB Tasty remembers that it is the same visitor without actually knowing who it is).
Cookies log the campaign variation the visitor has been assigned to, to be able to direct them back to the same variation during their future visits. This system avoids behavioral differences and thus misleading results. These cookies don’t store any information on the visitor’s identity.
AB Tasty relies on two different cookies to collect and store data about visitors: ABTasty and ABTastySession. In some cases, you may find a third cookie named ABTastyDomainTest. This is a technical cookie. The lifetime of this cookie is less than a second and its purpose is to check whether the domain where the tag is currently running is accessible. 

ABTasty cookie

This is a first-party cookie that has a lifetime of 13 months. The ABTasty cookie has two parts:  

• the first includes data and details about the visitor:

• the second includes information about the campaign the visitor has been allocated to:

ABTastySession cookie

This is a first-party cookie whose the lifetime depends on the duration of the session (a session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity on the website). Its purpose is to collect information about each user’s session. 
A fourth parameter may be present: the referrer. This stores the URL the visitor came from before landing on the website. This data is only available when the “source” or “source type” criteria are being used in the targeting of an active campaign.

Storage method

AB Tasty enables you to modify a cookies’ validity period. To do so, go to Settings > Advanced settings > Cookies > Select Storage Method.

Switching from Cookie to localStorage should not lead to any issues. We are doing an automatic data migration from the cookie to the localStorage and vice-versa. However, the localStorage method is not compatible with cross-domain tracking. In this case, data can’t be shared between subdomains. 

ABTastyOptout cookie

When a visitor doesn’t want to be assigned to any campaigns, they can opt-out by adding the “#abtastyoptout=1” parameter at the end of the website URL.
For example: http://www.abtasty.com/#abtastyoptout=1

Using this parameter creates a cookie in their browser that stores the opt-out information. For more information about this, please refer to How can I avoid being assigned to the tests (optout)?
For all the technical information and knowledge about AB Tasty cookies and storage, read the complete article on our developer portal.