In a move that will make tracking users and attribution significantly harder, Firefox announced a slew of new privacy features, including an upgraded Facebook Container. Firefox claim this will affect thousands of companies who use tracking. Firefox's announcement: Enhanced Tracking Protection will automatically be set on by default as part of the ‘Standard’ setting in … [Read more...]
Q&A with LinkConnector on Event and Cookie Attribution
How does a merchant decide to apportion the credit for a sale? Should the commission be paid to the last affiliate who touched the customer, or to the first affiliate who initiated the sales process? Or a mixture of the two? What if there are several affiliates involved? Allocating the credit for a transaction is known as Event Attribution (also sometimes called sales … [Read more...]
Out of Commission
How to Limit Commission Theft Find a trusted network and merchants. Ask other affiliates about their experiences with network partners, and if you are not being protected, take your business elsewhere. Likewise, if a merchant partner advertises via adware that is known to facilitate commission theft, you may be better off without them. Study your reports yourself for … [Read more...]
The Cookie Conundrum
Cookies will drive you nuts. As you know, cookies - or very small files that recognize you as uniquely you to particular websites - are kind of the backbone of affiliate marketing. If the cookie didn't exist, there would be no way for you to claim the sale or track your core customers. This would effectively kill affiliate sites in their tracks.Or will it? Recent studies on … [Read more...]
Clean Sweep
You're thinking of working with a merchant, but you don't want to be involved in any program that includes affiliates using questionable, if not illegal, practices. But how can you know for sure whose program is squeaky clean and whose is not?It's not easy to tell which merchants have clean programs. Maybe that's because it's not easy to pin down exactly what "clean" … [Read more...]
Should I Promote This Merchant
There are thousands upon thousands of affiliate programs offered by various Internet merchants. Deciding what programs to promote can be a daunting task. Let's explore the factors most successful affiliate marketers consider when faced with this decision.First and foremost, you must consider your site visitors' propensity to purchase the product or service or take the "desired … [Read more...]