Cookie Keeper power-up

The Cookie Keeper power-up extends the lifetime of your first-party cookies, preventing browsers with Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), such as Safari 16.4+, from expiring them after 7 days. This ensures consistent user identification, longer attribution windows, and more accurate retargeting across sessions.

Cookie Keeper securely saves each user’s unique ID inside a first-party master cookie. Every time a visitor returns, it checks this master cookie – if any of your selected marketing cookies are missing or expired, Cookie Keeper automatically restores them with their original values.

When using Stape plugins for WordPress or Magento, the master cookie (_sbp) is created and managed automatically upon installation, so no manual configuration is required to restore your chosen cookies. Similarly, the Stape Shopify app uses Shopify’s native Shopify_y and _y cookies as its master cookies.

If you need to track something beyond the standard integration list, you can easily define Custom cookies. For example, you can add twclid to retain your Twitter Ads click IDs.

Cookie Keeper without custom cookies is available on the Pro subscription plan and higher. The custom cookies are available on the Business subscription plan and higher. 

1. Log in to your Stape account and select your sGTM container from the dashboard.

2. Go to Power-ups and click Use next to the Cookie Keeper panel.

3. Toggle the Cookie Keeper switch to enable it.

4. Choose the platforms you want to extend cookies for by toggling Extend. Supported cookies include:

The steps below use Google Analytics _ga cookie as an example, but you can apply the same flow for any platform. To test the flow, make sure you’ve set up at least one GA4 tag.

1. 1.
   Open the Safari browser. The version shouldn’t be older than 16.4. To confirm the version, click Safari in the menu bar and select About Safari.
2. 2.
   Enter your site’s URL with the appended ?galid=test123 query parameter to set the _ga cookie. For example, yourwebsite.com/?galid=test123.
3. 3.
   Right-click the page → Inspect Element → Storage tab → Cookies.
4. 4.
   Locate _ga, copy and paste its value somewhere, then delete the cookie (right-click on the cookie → Delete).
5. 5.
   Refresh the page twice.
6. 6.
   Confirm the _ga cookie has reappeared with the same value. If yes, Cookie Keeper is working correctly.

A sample scenario is an eCommerce store where Safari accounts for roughly 30% of total traffic. Because Safari's ITP expires the _ga cookie after 7 days, a large share of returning visitors are re-identified as new users on every visit, and conversions from campaigns that run longer than a week lose their attribution chain, they show up as Direct in GA4 instead of their true source.

For example, an eyewear retailer running this exact setup saw 34.63% of all traffic misattributed as Direct. After enabling Cookie Keeper, Direct traffic dropped by 67.9%, while Paid Search grew by 56.8% and Organic Search by 36.1%.

You can achieve the same improvement with this flow:

1. 1.
   In Google Analytics, go to Reports → Traffic acquisition and look at the share of Direct / (none) sessions over a 30-day window. If Direct is disproportionately high, ITP cookie resets are likely transforming the known source sessions into Direct.
2. 2.
   Filter the Traffic acquisition by Browser. If Safari sessions show a noticeably higher Direct share than Chrome sessions for the same period, ITP is the cause.
3. 3.
   Enable Cookie Keeper and select to extend Google Analytics cookies.
4. 4.
   Monitor traffic acquisition after enabling Cookie Keeper. Direct traffic should begin declining as previously unattributed Safari sessions are correctly assigned to their original sources.