Why can Bread & Butter track a lead's full journey for up to 10 years, when CRMs and cookie-based tools lose the trail after a few months?
Most CRMs and marketing tools reconstruct a lead's history from cookies, and cookies were never built to last. Bread & Butter takes a different approach, one that holds up long after any browser-set cookie would have expired.
In short: Most CRMs and marketing tools rely on cookies that were never built to last, HubSpot's own attribution cookies expire after six months by default, and browsers themselves cap cookie lifespan even further (Safari limits many first-party cookies to 7 days, Chrome caps every cookie at roughly 13 months). Bread & Butter isn't limited by any of that, because once a visitor is verified, their full journey is tied to their profile rather than to a cookie that's built to expire, so retention extends to years, not months. That's also why a profile can't be deleted: doing so would break the continuous history that makes years of reconstruction possible in the first place.
Why Cookie-Based Tools Lose the Trail
Most CRMs and marketing platforms track visitors using cookies that were never built to last. HubSpot's own attribution cookies, for example, expire after six months by default, and that's actually generous compared to what browsers now allow. Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention caps many first-party cookies at just seven days, and Chrome enforces a hard 400-day maximum on every cookie set in the browser, regardless of vendor. However a tool is configured, the trail eventually breaks, not from bad design, but because the browser itself won't hold onto it any longer.
How Bread & Butter Keeps the Full Picture
Bread & Butter doesn't depend on a single cookie surviving for years, no cookie can. Once a visitor is verified, through a form submission, a subscribe widget, or an authenticated social login, that identity becomes the anchor instead of the cookie. Every session tied to that profile, past and future, gets reconstructed against that same verified identity, whether the person returns next week or years later, long after any original cookie would have expired.