Quote:
Originally Posted by faxxaff
Not sure why you say this, but 90% of my affiliate sales have always come from non-cookie promotions like vanities, white labels, redirects, referrer based tracking, etc. Cookies are obsolete, nobody needs them from my point of view.
NATS isn't a software for affiliates. It never was. It's a script that allows programs to track their sales better. It wasn't designed for affiliates to get credit.
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Referrer tracking - it works for IDENTIFYING the visitor, not to keep TRACKING them.
Referrer tracking without cookies = you don't get credited if the user closes the browser, reopens, and enters the domain.
Redirects - Maybe I misunderstand what you mean by this. If you have an URL that redirects to an URL with Affiliate Parameters, that's the same on the sponsor's end as the visitors clicking a link. You'll also lose the sale on browser close / domain type-in unless cookies are utilized.
Vanities - do you mean a special url/domain that redirects you to a final URL? Same as above.
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Basically all of the three above utilize or substitute Affiliate URL Parameters. These things IDENTIFY the user as yours when they first hit the site.
But what happens if the user leaves before registering, and then types in the domain again? There is no referrer information anymore. Sometimes no URL parameters either. How will the site know that it's your user who came back out of nowhere? The answer is COOKIES. The user's browser saved your affiliate ID, and it silently sends it together with every page load. This is called a Cookie. Cookies KEEP the user as yours. All of the solutions above use cookies to keep tracking the visitors after the first visit. Cookies make sure that if the visitor closes the browser, reopens, types in the domain, you will still get the sale.
The alternatives to cookie tracking: IP tracking (not reliable by itself), Flash cookies (maybe not anymore), permanent URL parameters (won't survive a plain type-in), browser fingerprints (probably the best of all of them, but I'm not sure how many platforms use them - it's not easy stuff, and maybe they don't mind a few affiliate sales being lost...)
Cookies have indeed become less efficient because people care more about their privacy, but they're still the best.
Whitelabels - you are right about this, this solution is pretty much perfect. It's great where it's an option. I wouldn't expect the majority porn sites to start offering whitelabels though. It goes against branding, they want to have their own watermarks on the pics,videos etc.