I’ll be part of a panel discussion on the good and evil sides of post-view tracking in affiliate marketing at the Affiliate NetworkxX in Munich on tomorrow evening. More details on the organizer’s blog. Here is a summary of the points that I’ll be trying to make there:
1. visibility of creatives
The current technical set-up for post-view tracking doesn’t ensure that cookies are set only if a banner is actually seen by a user. I don’t think it’s fair to give an affiliate credit for a post-view sale triggered by a banner that was placed at the very bottom of the screen. Most likely this banner didn’t have anything to do with the sale. A multitude of banners below the fold of the screen is simply cookie spamming.
2. cookie switches
Merchants working with more than one affiliate network or tracking tool must expand their cookie switch from clicks to impressions. Otherwise the same post-view transaction will be tracked by more than one network.
This essentially means that merchants need to have their own post-view tracking running. For most companies that’s quite unrealistic though because they either don’t have the skills to make it happen or don’t want to bear the extra cost of counting every single banner impression.
3. lack of transparency
Currently there is no transparency in the use of post-view tracking. There are networks that simply turned for it on for certain programs without approval by the merchants. About a year ago most networks proclaimed to kick cookie-spamming affiliates out of their networks. Now they seem to re-introduce cookie spamming again through the back door by the use of post-view tracking.
4. lack scientific proof
I am not aware of any independent study proving an increase of profits for merchants by the use of post-view tracking. Yes, of course more sales are being tracked, but in most cases they are just “stolen” elsewhere. There is a significant number of transactions that would have taken place with or without postview.