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WSJ’s Mossberg Ignites Cookie Furor

Jul 15, 2005
by

Without doubt, 2005 is the year of the cookie. This time it’s Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal Online who has ignited various discussions across the blogosphere and within digital communities.

What’s the news this time? Mossberg’s premise is a bit out-of-touch and definition of cookies focused exclusively on intent – a virtual non-issue. As one colleague has put it:

I think the title of his article may have given rise to a bit of a hysteria… yet within the body of the piece he does distinguish between “good” and “bad” cookies. From my reading of the article, the distinction lies in the intent of the party that placed the cookie.

That said, he does paint too broad a stroke in regard to tracking cookies. I can guarantee you the NY online ad community has responded – even those whose practices we would all agree are nefarious.

And as one Threadwatcher humorously attempts to describe Mossberg’s needlessly worrying perspective:

It’s like stopping someone before entering the supermarket and saying “You know, we use CCTV. That means we can watch every movement you make in the store, its recorded and kept for months too. You know that one time you scratched your ass in aisle 3? We have that on tape #322″…


Yet among all of this controversy about the cookie we rarely hear discussion about how the growing “anti-cookie agenda” is having, and will continue to have, profound impact on this booming industry called affiliate marketing. While ad agencies and analytics companies, like the increasingly creative PR team over at WebTrends, attempt to deal with the question of “is tracking with cookies accurate enough?” the direct response industry pretends that the problem doesn’t exist.

The fact remains: cookie deletion has impact on affiliate marketing to the tune of lost revenues for affiliates and affiliate networks. To what degree? Apparently it’s not worth discussing nor concerning ourselves over… even in the face escalating anti-cookie sentiment, be it ill-informed or not!

About Jeff Molander

Jeff Molander is the authority on making social media sell and corporate trainer to small businesses and global corporations like IBM and Brazil’s energy company, Petrobras. He’s an accomplished entrepreneur, having co-founded what is today the Google Affiliate Network. He’s adjunct digital marketing professor at Loyola University’s school of business and author of Off the Hook Marketing: How to Make Social Media Sell for You.

Website: JeffMolander.com

Blog: Off the Hook Blog

Answers: AskJeffMolander.com

You can find Jeff on Twitter @jeffreymolander.

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing
  • http://howtolivefree.com MG

    Can you point us to a site that discusses cookie technology? Many programs that clear your cache also wipe out cookies causing lost commissions. Shouldn't cookies be set at the server level once triggered? If the clients deletes his cookies but comes back, shouldn't the server have a record of his or her initial visit and give appropriate credit to the initial aff ID?

  • http://www.kowabunga.com Jeff Doak

    MG — Coookies are important for tracking because there is nothing else (at server level, for instance) that can uniquely identify a computer visiting a site. IP addresses can be tracked at the server side, but they are not unique and can be shared by several users.

    The best way to capture return visitors who delete cookies is to encouarge the visitor to register in some way at the merchant site and then login each time. An affiliate id can then be tied to that login.

    In general, statistics show that most users keep cookies for 1-2 weeks and almost all users leave cookies on when browsing. Cookie deletion is therefore not having a big impact on most affiliate marketing efforts, as click to sale time is usually within 72 hours for most sites. Where cookie deletion is having its biggest impact is in the web analytics industry, and specifically those applications which attempt to measure return customer information.

    As an affiliate, it may make sense to drive traffic to merchants who have lower priced or impulse products where the sale happens immediately after the click. If a merchant has a more expensive product (and thus a longer buying cycle), make sure that merchant is attempting to at least capture the visitor's email address or other contact information on the first visit, and tying the affiliate id to that information.