Users have apparently been adding insult (rejection) to injury (deletion) when it comes to the cookie-deletion controversy. The percentage of website visitors rejecting third-party cookies quadrupled last year, from roughly 3 percent in January to 12 percent in December and has hovered at that rate up to this month, according to WebTrends, MediaPost writes. The analytics company looked at records of some five billion visitor sessions, during 16 months, on thousands of its clients' websites.

The WebTrends research showed that third-party rejections occurred most frequently in retail, with 16.7 percent of visitors declining third-party cookies; other high-rejection-rate categories are telecom (15.4 percent), healthcare (14.7 percent), manufacturing (13.3 percent), transportation (13 percent) and media (12 percent).

iMedia writes that WebTrends has launched version 7.5 of its analytics tool, which will better deal with the cookie-deletion controversy. The new features will allow the company, and publishers, to "bypass the third party cookies and leverage the first party cookies that the customers are already setting," according to a WebTrends spokesperson.

Recent Coverage: The Cookie Imbroglio
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- Study: 27 Percent Weekly Clearing Cookies
- InsightExpress: Rumors of Cookie Demise Still Greatly Exaggerated
- Cookie Death Small Potatoes, More Product of Spyware Measures
- Atlas: Cookie Deletion Figures Exaggerated Wildly by Self-Reported Data
- Macromedia CTO: Yeah, Flash Makes for Good Cookie Replacements
- Cookie Death Causes Search for Successor
- Cookie Death Partly Due to 'Anti-Spyware' Tools
- Tacoda Tech Replaces Deleted Cookies
- Many Delete Cookies, Invalidate Ad Measurements
- House Removes Threat to Cookies in Spyware Bill