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I've searched for information if GA can track if a specific third party cookie is set in a visitors web browser. And if so, if that tracking data can be used for segmentation of data in reports.

Ex: Visitor X arrives to my website. A third party cookie Y has earlier been set in visitor X's web browser when he/she interacted with another web application. Now, can GA track the existence of cookie Y and send that tracking data into my analytics system for use in reports? For example for segmentation of visitor behaviour.

/Axel

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A third party cookie is a cookie set on a different domain. Google Analytics tracking code runs within the context of your own domain. Scripts on your own domain cannot read cookies from other domains. So no, by default Google Analytic cannot track third party cookies.

There are workarounds, but IMO they will only work if the owner of the other domains cooperate (e.g. I once built a poor mans banner postview tracking for an Adserver by calling a script on their domain that would resolve their cookie and return the user id in a jsonp response, but I built this on an infrastructure that was already in place).

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