Multi-Merchant Cookie Spamming
September 17th, 2009 by Peter Glaeser |
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German affiliate network SuperClix has openly rejected the use of post-view tracking. Marcus Lutz, the owner, even sent out t-shirts to make his point. Thanks for that.
I am not against post-view per se. I think this is a good approach to rewarding affiliates that provide advertising value even without producing clicks. But the way it is being conducted by most affiliates and networks these days is NOT how it was originally intended to be. Currently it does more harm than good. That’s why I support SuperClix fully in this regard.
In theory, post-view tracking is supposed to reward affiliates for sales that originated not in clicks but in impressions of creatives. For example, a user would see a banner and a couple hours later go to the merchant’s website because he remembered the ad. In this case it would be absolutely fair to pay that affiliate a commission for a sale because he contributed directly to the transaction.
In today’s practice however, I would say that there is little connection bewteen the impression of the ad and a post-view sale. Most transactions that are considered post-view sales are purely based on cookie-spamming. Why?
Post-view affiliates know that they can’t make money legitimately. That’s why they create multi-merchant banners, displaying say three ads (and dropping three cookies) at one time. And to make this even worse, these banners contain rotations, so that new ads are being shown every ten seconds (thus new cookies are being dropped). And the smaller the ads are the less likely they are going to create a real advertising effect.
So merchants, don’t get fooled by what networks, agencies and affiliates tell you. At this stage, post-view tracking is still a rip-off and a bunch of crap. There are no standards yet, it’s the wild west days. These days you will not make more money just because of post-view tracking. The opposite is true, you will end up spending more.
3 Responses to “Multi-Merchant Cookie Spamming”
By Geno Prussakov on Sep 17, 2009 | Reply
Good and important post, Peter. Any avenue that allows for a possibility of cookie stuffing by an unethical affiliate should be closely monitored by merchants, their program managers AND affiliate networks (too frequently the last two parties prefer to be silent about issues, because they are often financially interested in seeing more sales driven to the merchant whether the affiliate has really added value or not).
Has SuperClix supported the post-view tracking before? I don’t know of one affiliate network that does that.
By Peter Glaeser on Sep 17, 2009 | Reply
There are even networks that had secretly turned it on for certain programs. I won’t mention any names though.