Masterclass: Upgrading Your Affiliate Tracking

If you truly want to ensure the accurate measurement of your affiliate activity in light of ongoing changes to privacy and consent requirements, ad-blocker adoption, and third-party cookie deprecation, it’s time to listen up.  

Since launching our landmark Conversion Protection Initiative (CPI), Awin has been busy educating advertisers on the speedy implementation, vast applicability, and cost-effectiveness of upgrading to modern standards such as server-to-server (S2S) and mobile app tracking. We’ve even drawn parallels between optimal tracking and running a high-performing affiliate program.  

This time, we’re laying out a tracking masterclass from our Awin-Win Marketing Podcast.   

Rob Davinson (Head of Content - Awin) sat down with Greg Baines (SVP - Gen3 Marketing) and Steve Brown (Founder & CEO - Moonpull) to discuss the importance of tracking upgrades in light of Gen3’s auditing of several advertiser programs. 

Listen to the full episode for tracking pointers, or check out our write-up below.

Why is it so important to have optimal affiliate tracking in place? 

Given his position as Founder and CEO of Moonpull, “the world’s only auditing platform for affiliate tracking”, it was only right that we invited Steve on our podcast to recommend ways of addressing the tracking dilemmas that many advertisers now find themselves in.  

Greg’s years of advertiser-side experience at companies like Hewlett-Packard and Snapfish, and support of clients in a range of verticals at performance marketing agency Gen3, also earn him a seat at the table. 

As Steve and Greg explain, tracking is ultimately a way of demonstrating and recognizing the contribution of your affiliates, and justifying why your channel matters.  

Greg: “Because I've had everything from TV and out of home through to paid search, SEO, content, and affiliates, I do have a good understanding of how the channels have to play together. And then the challenges you have as a client [affiliate manager] trying to ask for budget. That's why tracking is so important – the more you can track as the channel owner, the more you can fight for the budget… And the more you understand the different types of tracking, the better it is when you're having those conversations with your boss about why you need that budget as an affiliate manager, rather than the paid search manager, that the analytics might say, drives 70% of their sales.” 

Better tracking creates more accurate data, which breeds knowledge, helping advertisers make the kind of decisions that elevate sales and conversion rates (CVR), all at a lower cost. In 2024, we found that advertisers using high-quality standards such as S2S or mobile app tracking increased their CVR by 9.6% in 2024, while those with poor setups saw theirs decline by 20.2%. 

Why affiliate tracking is a growing concern 

Is tracking more difficult for affiliate managers? From Greg’s perspective, other marketers don’t require the same robust, multi-touch attribution to pinpoint where they’re making a contribution.  

Greg: “It's a lot easier in paid search because it's a lot more linear, whereas with affiliates, you might be going to a review site or a content site. You might find an offer, and then you switch devices, or you find an offer and then type in [search for] the brand to make the purchase, and click on the paid search link.” 

There are many other scenarios that underline why a solid understanding of tracking - or at least the partners that create a clear view - is becoming more essential. To name just three: 

#1 User consent 

When users hit ‘reject all’ on a banner proposing the collection of third-party cookies, it becomes much harder for affiliate managers to gain visibility into their journey and understand where publishers have contributed to it.   

From Steve’s perspective, user or ‘cookie’ consent is the single biggest challenge to affiliate managers aiming for optimal tracking.  

 #2 Ad blockers 

Approximately 33% of the world’s web users have an ad blocker, which prevents tracking scripts and affiliate links from firing, making it impossible to record a referral from a publisher.  

While these tools have been hailed for their impact on the end user, affiliates lose out on commission, and advertisers face incomplete performance data.  

 #3 The future of third-party cookies 

Google’s indecision over the future of third-party cookies on its Chrome browser has accelerated the need for first-party standards like S2S to safeguard affiliate contributions.   

Considering these factors, it was worth asking the guests how broken affiliate tracking is today on a scale between 1 and 10. We weren’t expecting a simple answer, but Steve delivered at least a degree of optimism in his response.  

Steve: “It's on a spectrum… Sometimes it can be for some advertisers, nine. I hesitate to say 10, because there are always things like ad blockers out there. The internet is slow. Sometimes it inhibits things…”  

Great, so we’re 90% there? Not quite. 

Steve: “It goes sub-five sometimes. But I think one of the things that publishers are doing is being more selective of their advertisers, and actually they're drawing advertisers towards the top of the scale, because they know where they're actually losing out a little bit more now.” 

Steve rightly points out that publishers are beginning to influence the wholesale improvement of advertiser tracking setups in a big way. 

In Awin’s own investigations into how tracking impacts relationships in the affiliate channel, we heard how fintech publisher Zilch actively recommends advertisers tracking with high accuracy, even suggesting them to customers searching for offers from their competitors.  

Moonpull itself has a certification for advertisers auditing a certain number of links on a regular basis, making it easier for publishers to spot which programs are worth joining. 

Steve: “The certification badge is one that publishers should take reassurance from… If they promote this advertiser, it's going to track. It’s a very visual way of saying we're playing our part in the partnership.” 

Affiliate tracking: who’s responsible? 

Standards like S2S and mobile app tracking (applicable only to those with a transactional app) and audits through partners such as Moonpull can quickly bring advertisers up to speed. But who leads the charge? 

Greg: “Honestly, I think it's a collective issue. Because we all have a vested interest in it, we need to work together. There's a danger that you might get a publisher contacting an advertiser directly, and the advertiser's like, ‘I don’t know what's going on’. Or you have the network doing it, and the client [advertiser] might not know what's going on.”  

As a practical step, Greg cites the example of an agency working with both networks and publishers on behalf of their advertisers to line up the usual suspects. 

Greg: “Steve and I have done a lot of work just identifying the top 10, which became the top 15, reasons why tracking breaks. I think we need to be sharing that and explaining there are lots of ways tracking can break, and as a collective industry, we're on top of them so that we can all educate, learn, and fix.” 

Steve: “I think there's a need for people to understand their contribution towards understanding tracking. So if you're a publisher and you're about to send 10,000 clicks to an offer, you should do the diligence and check that it's going to track before you send that traffic there… Like other industries, you have an obligation to your professional self to actually understand if the partners you are working with are reliable.” 

That collaboration could be made easier if the affiliate industry agreed on a standardized approach. While Awin’s CPI aims to provide our advertisers with a consistently high standard of tracking, advertisers on other platforms may not achieve the same level of consistency. 

Greg: “It's very hard to move forward as an industry when we've got these inconsistencies and the affiliate channel's got so many different types of opportunities, from someone reading a magazine article and clicking through on a link to Shopping through Google, to looking for a voucher code and cashback and all the other different types of affiliates I haven't mentioned…” 

It can be argued that fragmentation and a lack of standardization are what make the channel so unique and accommodating of advertisers and their goals. But Greg believes advertisers could be doing more, particularly when it comes to aligning with other marketing channels.  

Greg: “As a client [advertiser], one of the things I always tried to do was to be consistent with my cookie duration. There's no point saying on affiliates it's 45 days, but it's seven days on search… Let's have it the same so we can measure it the same, because the more you can avoid that channel conflict, the more confidence the finance team have in your ability to optimize the programs, and therefore you've got more chance of getting the budget. 

Implementing tracking: where to start? 

Tracking can be scary for affiliate managers. Alongside their skills in relationship management, data, compliance, and project management, they could be forgiven for lacking an expert-level understanding of the code that informs whether an event is tracked or not.  

That’s where outsourcing and detailed mapping of the user journey come into play.  

Greg: “The dev team can only implement what the marketing team's instructed them to do... Does a brand have a subdomain? Is that included in the user journey? Do you have two sites that you send traffic between? Are you passing the traffic values from one site to the other? Do you have an m-website [mobile site] or a native app? Is it tracked?” 

The education piece within tracking is essentially about passing information through the chain, from the publisher to the advertiser, to fix any outstanding issues. To this end, the humanizing of inherently technical language seems to be getting the message across. 

Steve: “We very much use the term, ‘the memory cookie’ as the cookie that has to be there to link the handover from the publisher through the redirect path to the advertiser. At the end of the journey, you've got the checkout page that talks back, and you need a memory between the two stages to make affiliate marketing work.”  

The question Moonpull is challenging its publisher clients to ask is, ‘Is the memory cookie there?’ By and large, if the answer is yes, they won’t have a problem. But what if it isn’t? 

Steve: “That [message] can then go down the chain, and when it arrives at the affiliate manager at the brand, they don't go, ‘My goodness, tracking is scary’. They go, ‘I've got a tracking query and the publisher's telling me the memory cookie's not there’.”  

From here, it’s a case of sending the right instructions from a partner like Moonpull to their development team to fix the issue. 

Greg: “In the past, we might have said, ‘Hey, tracking's broken’... Now I can say, ‘Here's the Moonpull audit. Here are all the technical reports, including where it’s breaking and what the issues are’. We can give that to the affiliate manager who passes it onto their dev team. We fix things a lot faster, and there's no back and forth. We don't have endless email exchanges.” 

Where should you start with fixing your affiliate tracking?  

If you lack the technical understanding to spot and fix tracking issues, enlisting the help of a partner to audit your setup can help. In just eight months of working with Moonpull, the advertisers on Gen3 have started to find where things are going wrong. 

Greg: “The biggest issue we found really is the cookie consent banner, because it's not something that the marketing team would typically consider when they're checking their tracking. It's managed by the legal and compliance team, who don't understand the implications of what they're doing. They just need to make sure that customers have the option to opt in to be tracked.” 

Steve: “Legal teams are buying [cookie] consent products, not for online marketing reasons. They're buying it because they've got to comply with CCPA [California Consumer Privacy Act] or they've got to comply with GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], and so they've got to put a consent infrastructure into place… The legal team have given them this product, and the marketing team has gone, ‘Thanks... now what do I do? How do we adapt it to suit our own purposes?’” 

Greg: “That's probably the biggest challenge we face. And then it's more where maybe a new product line has been launched. Or it's a new country and the testing just hasn't worked, or things just break over time.” 

New events mean auditing should be a regular task, rather than a one-off.  

Steve: “We could probably have done a list of 10 [tracking issues] ourselves prior to working closely with Gen3. We doubled that quite quickly to about 20 different ways, which might be because the Shopify tag is out of date. It's things like that, that we hadn't perhaps considered would be an issue for why tracking might not work.” 

Have the audits been welcomed among the advertisers who might pay out on more sales when their tracking is fixed? Steve’s story of a publisher missing out on a six-figure sum due to an issue with an advertiser’s first-party tracking provides a glimpse of just how many contributions could be going untracked.  

Steve: “By and large, the answer is yes, because they know that that's part of the journey of running an affiliate program. At some point in time, they're going to have competitive pressure where their peers do have programs that track well, and they need to be playing the same game… If you see the right result of a campaign, then you can actually grow the program and you can talk to your colleagues about it.” 

Greg: “They really value it. They thank us for highlighting where there are issues more promptly, and giving them the data to fix them more easily… A small client might have to outsource the request to a dev consultancy. A bigger business might have to just book in the time, and dev teams never have enough time… We get things fixed relatively quickly.” 

Steve: “One of my hopes is, over time, it just becomes a hygiene thing… And it's not a question of, ‘Should we do it now? Should we do it in three months’ time?’ It just becomes that sort of cadence of response.” 

Learn more about Awin’s CPI