Essential Cookies Part Deux

In my last journal entry Jeff Doak gave us a nice backgrounder on cookies and what they are and how they work.

Being a solution provider I asked Jeff the ultimate question: “Jeff, if you were building a site from scratch, with no IT limitations, what would be the most reliable tracking solution for an affiliate program?”

Jeff had plenty of answers and ideas…

1. The affiliate link is direct to the merchant’s domain, to help with link popularity. Many networks instead use one domain to manage all affiliate links, and this system gives the network link popularity, not the merchant. Many ad blocking applications can also easily block affiliate network links by simply screening html for specific domains. This issue threatens to be more important as time goes on.

2. The affiliate id is passed in the URL of that link and picked up on the landing page of the merchant site by some scripting method; preferably something server side like .asp or .php. JavaScript can do this as well, but some users have JavaScript disabled.

3. That customer is immediately encouraged to register or otherwise give some sort of identifying piece of information (like an email address) on that same landing page. The affiliate id can then be easily linked to a real person in a database, and you eliminate the need to worry about a cookie or passing the id throughout the URL.

4. As a backup, that affiliate id is also written as a first party cookie to the merchant’s site, and is also passed in the URL throughout the site, where the user is further encouraged to register if they have not already done so. If the user deletes cookies, the URL still has them tracked. If they leave the site, losing the URL tracking, the cookie will track them.

5. As on the landing page, if at any stage of this process the user registers or gives an email address, that id number is associated with the user in a database.

6. Any time an order is placed from then on, the association between user and affiliate is looked up in the merchant’s database.

How the affiliate id and order get from the merchant to provider doesn’t really matter at this point, though a direct feed from the merchant’s database to the provider is probably best. A completely in house solution would eliminate this worry altogether of course.

The key here is associating the user with the id that referred them as quickly as possible — on the landing page if you can. The reason tracking breaks down at any level, as we’ve seen, is because it is inherently difficult to determine who someone is once they have left the landing page.

Again, this list is intended to answer the question about the most reliable tracking method, not what is best for a given merchant. It wouldn’t make sense for many merchants to edit their site to prompt a user for information on the landing page, and many merchants don’t have the resources to implement URL tracking, for instance.

The only way this will ever change is if the structure of the internet changes enough so that a browser session can determine the MAC address of a user (the id number of the network card on their computer, essentially). Right now that is not possible, and probably will never be as long as AOL and other companies use proxy servers.

Thanks for the ideas Jeff!

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