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Affiliate Marketing in a Post-Cookie World: Strategies for Future Success
October 11, 2023
Affiliate Marketing in a Post-Cookie World: Strategies for Future Success
Cookies play a fundamental role in affiliate marketing by enabling the tracking and attribution of conversions, which is essential for fairly compensating affiliates for their promotional efforts. Traditionally, in tracking user behavior and attributing conversions to specific affiliates. However, recent changes in the digital landscape, such as increased privacy concerns and the phasing out of third-party cookies, have prompted affiliate marketers to adapt and evolve their strategies for future success.
The Dilemma Caused By Cookies
Cookies have been the lifeblood of online tracking for years. These small pieces of data stored on users’ devices allowed websites to recognize and remember visitors, providing a seamless and personalized browsing experience. In the context of affiliate marketing, cookies were used to attribute sales or leads to specific affiliates, ensuring they received their fair share of commissions.
However, the digital marketing environment is undergoing a significant transformation. Third-party cookies are being phased out due to heightened privacy regulations and evolving consumer mindsets towards data privacy. As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult to accurately monitor user activity across the web. This presents a major challenge to affiliate marketers who depend on cookies to measure conversions.
Steps Businesses Can Take to Prepare for a Post-cookie World
Embracing First-Party Cookies: First-party cookies mean collecting data that is stored directly on the website or domain visited by the user. Cookies allow website owners to collect analytics, language preferences, demographic information, etc.
Although affiliates can leverage this data to track user interactions and conversion attributions by:
Implementing a robust CRM system: A Customer Relationship Management system helps in the management of customer data. It’s a goldmine of customer data, allowing you to collect customers’ demographics, preferences, and purchase histories.
Leverage user accounts: Encourage users to create accounts on your website. This not only enhances the user experience but also provides you with valuable first-party data. You can link conversions to specific affiliate referrals when users are logged in.
Website optimization: Website owners can stop worrying about traffic by performing website optimization. It is safe to assume that things will not get better when cookiepocalypse strikes if your website is already seeing a decline in traffic or if your current marketing campaigns are not producing the desired results.
Focus on contextual targeting: In a post-cookie world, contextual targeting is becoming more and more popular as a successful advertising tactic. Instead of relying solely on user data, contextual targeting involves displaying ads based on the content of the webpage. This entails working with affiliates whose content complements their goods or services for affiliate marketers.
Implement attribution modeling: In the past, affiliate marketing frequently relied on a last-click attribution model, where the affiliate received full credit for the final click prior to a conversion. It is time to switch to more sophisticated attribution models that take the entire customer journey into account in a cookie-less world.
Multi-touch attribution: Multi-touch attribution models give weight to every stage of the customer journey and acknowledge affiliates who made contributions at various points. This method offers a more comprehensive understanding of an affiliate’s influence.
Time decay attribution: Time decay attribution gives more weight to touchpoints that occur closer to the conversion. It acknowledges that early user engagement by affiliates may have a lasting effect.
Building trust and transparency: Connecting with customers and target audiences will build trust between the brand and its audience. Brands should shift their focus to personalization so that their customers resonate with the brand’s voice.
Explore other affiliate models: When the original method of tracking is unavailable, brands should consider trying different models. Few of them are listed below: