Cookie Tracking and Vulnerable Affiliate & Ad Networks
by Sapphire (September 17, 2006)
Here’s an interesting report on which affiliate and ad networks are most likely to have their cookies detected and purged by your visitor’s anti-spyware software. (Thanks to 5StarAffiliatePrograms for the tip.) It also contains some very informative links to studies such as this one by BurstMedia, which finds that 30 - 60% of users dislike and delete cookies. ShareASale and ShareResults don’t get their cookies detected by any of the programs tested in this study, while CJ and Linkshare do - a lot.
Neither, strangely, does Google - while Yahoo! does. This surprised me because, as I reported a while back, before I stopped using both of them I was seeing less and less impressions per day from Google compared to Yahoo, and one of my theories on that was that the ads were being blocked by browsers. Now I’m guessing that’s wrong, and I’ll have to go with my other theory: Google does some sort of geo-targeting or something that causes it only to count certain impressions. Which probably means they do a better job of filtering invalid clicks, though I’m just guessing.
That article, along with the links it connects you to, makes for some pretty interesting reading. I mean, when you serve up links, you want to maximize the chance they’ll actually convert. Cookie tracking has a huge negative impact on that possibility.
Posted in Affiliate Marketing
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