Whilst it looks like the EU has seen sense (or Google have lobbied hard) and decided against this well intentioned but ultimately impossible regulation against cookies (full details), it has raised the question about the future of cookie tracking in the affiliate channel.
A few networks have implemented cookieless tracking, and a few bold claims have been made. My problem is that I’ve never seen any empirical evidence that demonstrates this, which must be not only the most categoric way of proving these claims, but also the easiest.
Networks such as Webgains, Paid on Results and Affiliate Future have invested in “cookieless” tracking and Affiliate Window are currently rolling it out across their merchant base. Now all of these networks run campaigns that are dual network with traditional, cookie only tracking in place. Surely a comparison of the conversion rate across each campaign would answer the argument once and for all. Whilst I appreciate that this may vary slightly dependant on the type of affiliates on each campaign, it should give a reasonable indication.
Furthermore, affiliates are generally pretty savvy and I’m convinced that we’d have seen a switch from those networks without “cookieless” tracking to those with, to take advantage of the increased sales. In particular, the big cashback sites who work across multiple networks and also invest a lot of resource in dealing with missing transactions. They have more visibility than anyone and yet there doesn’t seem to have been much desire to consolidate their business to the networks with the more advanced tracking.
My second point is that if we do accept that more sales will be tracked through “cookieless” tracking, does that mean that merchants should reduce their commission rates? It has always been accepted that a certain percentage of sales will not be tracked and so therefore, CPA rates have always been artificially high to compensate for this. If tracking is improving, should we be looking to reduce commissions as merchants are effectively now paying for sales that they would previously have got for free.
I’m sure this argument will not be popular with affiliates or networks, but should provoke interesting debate…
