Affiliate Tracking and Data

How affiliate tracking works

Although there are multiple methods of tracking affiliate sales, the vast majority of networks and programs rely on cookie based tracking, this is often backed up by one of the following methods of tracking:

• Affiliate codes
• Tracking URLs
• IP tracking
• Proprietary (network owned) tracking methods

As cookie tracking is the dominant form of tracking in the UK affiliate marketing space, it is important that for a program to be successful that it adheres to current best practice.

Cookie Length

When deciding on cookie length a merchant should first consider the competitive advantage that offering a long cookie can give. By comparing your own cookie length to competitor programs affiliates will often choose the longer cookie as this gives a greater time window for the users to transact with the merchant. Click-to-sale times from other marketing activity should also be scrutinized as this may provide some insight into the user purchase experience. 30 days is a fairly standard cookie length, a significant reduction on this may damage program take-up with larger cookie lengths encouraging early program adoption.

Last-click referrer

The main limitation of the current cookie-based tracking mentality is that essentially, one affiliate will always be the only official sales driver. Of course, user journeys are considerably more complicated than that with multiple touch points leading to the eventual transaction. For some time the UK market has almost entirely awarded commissions on the basis of the last click. This can lead to many of the original persuaders in a sale not being appropriately awarded. Although there are industry initiatives aimed at looking at this issue in more depth, this is a complicated issues and it is unlikely that solutions will present themselves to market in the short term. Current best practice suggests that maintaining a consistent last referrer approach is the most viable solution even though its flaws are explicitly known.

Dealing with duplicate sales

Merchants with multi-channel marketing plans (ie those merchants who run an affiliate program in conjunction with paid search, e-mail marketing, display etc) will need to consider how these channels are rewarded and/or recognised in relation to each other. Without a coherent and consistent duplication policy merchants may well end up paying multiple times for a single sale. Merchants running multiple affiliate programs will also experience this.

Current best practice allows merchants to “de-dupe” these sales, there are three main methods for achieving this.

1. Manual De-duplication

Essentially, this is trawling through multiple data sources to identify duplicate sales and deleting them manually. It can be a resource heavy approach and is not recommended, particularly as it has the additional negative effect of deleting affiliates sales from network interfaces, which can make revenue prediction difficult for affiliates and give a negative perception of the merchant. It may also impact networks published deletion rates.

2. Universal Tagging

Several firms offer universal tagging systems that can be integrated with affiliate networks. These have the ability to reward last-referrer commissions and/or sales to the appropriate source. These technologies are fairly new and can also be quite costly.

3. Local cookies (click-append)

By appending a source specific code to the end of incoming urls, cookies can be shown only as appropriate and overwrite each other. This allows for a cost-free de-duplication process. It is imperative that network partners are comfortable with the methodologies utilised to achieve this to ensure that there are no missed genuine sales.

Although the solutions above allow for de-duplication it is important to understand which areas should be “de-duped” as part of this process. Although opinion is somewhat divided it is considered that the following areas should not be de-duped to allow the affiliate program to compete fairly with other forms of marketing

• E-mail marketing to existing customer base
• All natural search engine optimisation work
• Brand based paid search activity