Death Of Affiliate Marketing? (8)
Sorry about the Clickbait headline, but this is something you can't ignore if you want to be in biz past 2019
This is a repost from comments I made in another thread, but it needs its own post in order to not hijack that one too much.
Plus we all need to talk and I expect the discussions could get lengthy. I specifically invite reps from networks, network software and all trackers to chime in here. Because isolated fixes to this problem means it's still going to be a problem for everyone.
The issue is the current and coming privacy changes to browsers (imho: much needed). These change are great for all of us as consumers, but it also means a lot of what made this industry work is getting broken.
The two major issues arising from this are:
1. Your tracker not being able to attribute all sales and conversions
2. Your affiliate network not being able to attribute all sales and conversions (this is where it gets really messy)
On the tracker side. Custom domains could fix some of the issues, if you depend on pixels for conversion tracking, the sale needs to happen in 7 days and you'll have no problem. Beyond that, no attribution will happen. The apparent work around would be to use postbacks since that's "cookieless"
But "cookieless" really just means that the network software can ping your tracking software to mark a conversion without using cookies. BUT the network software still needs cookies to work to identify the person that converted so they can trigger the "cookieless" postback.
Fingerprinting is out of the question, because all browsers are taking active steps to make them less effective. Affiliates will love all the free money and conversion from people who they didn't really send to the offer, but networks and offer owners(advertisers) are going to get bankrupt from all the duplicate conversions if they are 100% depending on finger printing for attribution.
But the problem here is that your network needs to also be able to attribute past the 7 day mark. At the network level, it gets worse. Most networks are the 3rd party javascript on the merchant page. So problem 1 is that cookies never get set when your traffic hits the offer page.
They can get around this by providing a custom sub-domain, this could fix the no cookie issue. I say could because, the browsers could choose to classify subdomains as 3rd party to the main domain.
Coming in soon, any link with url variables will have cookies capped at a 1 day life if the redirect happened from a url determined to have cross-site tracking capabilities (aka all affiliate tracking links)
Having a Self-hosted tracker doesn't fix everything, but it fixes a lot in with easy changes that hosted trackers will have a much harder time fixing or can't fix. Here are two example
1. Hosted trackers are going to have to allow the ability to use unlimited custom tracking urls. Either free or paid. This could break if browsers start tracking subdomains as 3rd party urls. Self-hosted trackers can usually be installed on a subdomain, making all tracking 1st party.
2. Hosted trackers are going to have to find a way to set server side cookies to be able to bypass the 7 day cookie limitation for ios and desktop safari. With the rise of mobile, this is something that can't be ignored. Self hosted trackers can set server-side cookies for the domain without the use of javascript.
If there ever was a case to run for the hills screaming "affiliate marketing is dead", this would be it lol.
But seriously, it's not really all going to die. There will be some casualties. The overhaul needed to make attribution work could kill some networks, trackers and eventually affiliates. When the offer that makes you all your money can't attribute 30-100% of your sales, you can see how you could wipe you out overnight.
Choose your partners wisely, now's the time to interrogate them to see what they are doing about this. Pro Tip: Don't take a simple "It's addressed and we are not affected" for an answer. Ask what's being done specifically to address the all the issues I outlined.
2019 and beyond is certainly going to be "interesting" for all of us
Further reading:
Firefox:
https://blog.mozilla.org/futurerelea...anti-tracking/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/..._access_policy
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2019/0...alue-exchange/
Webkit (this powers safari on ios and desktop)
https://webkit.org/blog/category/privacy/
Chrome also powers Brave (already a highly secure browser the strips out tracking), and the new Microsoft edge browser
https://blog.chromium.org/2019/05/im...ty-on-web.html
https://web.dev/samesite-cookies-explained/
https://www.microsoftedgeinsider.com/en-us/whats-next
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/...mode-devtools/
https://brave.com/features/
Great post MrBafoe, thanks for taking the time to write it.
I assume that the most popular platforms such as cake or hasoffers are using cookies for tracking purposes, am I right?
Originally Posted by matuloo
Unfortunately, I don't understand too much about tech, and it will not be me who delivers a solution to this potential problem.
But I'm wondering about this.
Say you pass your affiliate ID and other custom variables through: http://www.offerpage.com/?affiliate=...n&clickid=xxxx
Won't the offer owner be able to ready the affiliate and clicid tokens with the potential changes coming?
Does P202 deal with this or is it mainly on the affiliate network side (cake, etc.)?
Originally Posted by osmiumman
Most of the time there is a redirect from your tracking link to the network’s tracking link which then redirects to the offer owner.
Once Safari classifies the network link as a tracker, cookies the offer owner sets on the page with JavaScript automatically became a one day cookie. Usually there’s a JavaScript on the page that grabs the information in the url string and saves it into a cookie.
If the offer owner has server side code that grabs the information and saves a cookie then this will allow for longer life cookies.
Prosper202 can help with this by making it an easy no code process, but the offer owner can also just write some code to do the same.
Which is why I mention that you need to talk to the networks to ensure they have done what’s necessary to get your sales tracked properly.
Thankfully for affiliates, it’s in the network’s best interest to fix this too, because they also don’t get paid when sales are not tracked correctly.
Here’s the recent update from Apple that talks about the issue I described above. I believe this is live in the most recent iOS and desktop safari updates
https://webkit.org/blog/8828/intelli...revention-2-2/
Originally Posted by micoangelo
Prosper202 sets a 1st party cookie and because it can be self hosted on the domain of your lp, it’s also able to set the cookie server side to avoid the safari cookie life issue.
Overall, trackers don’t need have a critical need for cookies because of postbacks.
The bigger issue is tracking on the network side (hasoffers, CAKE, in-house) not working.
I would assume hasoffers and CAKE are aware of this and are rolling out solutions and guidance.
This is from TUNE aka hasoffers
https://www.tune.com/blog/future-per...tp-2-0-update/
Here’s what CAKE had for itp 2.0. https://getcake.com/apples-intellige...is-impact-you/
Because of ITP 2.1 and 2.2, some of the solutions mentioned in the two posts above are no longer as effective.
Decided to jump into this discussing to share some experience from operating a SaaS tracker.
We switched to cookieless some time ago and honestly since we keep backwards compatibility for our customers - almost no-one noticed. It allowed our users some crazy experiments with storing clickids in GTM data layers and send postbacks using GTM. And it allowed us to implement some interesting solutions like discretely tracking multiple traffic sources sending clicks to one and the same landing page.
So trackers are the least affected by this if they are willing to do some extra work. And same would apply to all other actors in the process.
The advertisers are the ones who are most vulnerable the process, as they often use different types of checkout software that often is not clickid / postback friendly. We know this first hand as we try to support several advertisers who stumbled into the issue. But I think e-com/checkout providers will find they way to handle it too.
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