Transcript:

Is Your Tracking Lacking?

Impacts of a Cookie-Free Era on Affiliate Marketing

Melissa: All right. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening from wherever you’re joining us today. We’re so glad that you’re here for our session today. Is your tracking lacking the impacts of a cookie free era on affiliate marketing?  So, a little bit of housekeeping before we jump into today’s session,  please write any questions you have in the questions field using that go to webinar console.

We’ll take time at the end and answer your questions. If we aren’t able to get to you during our live session, we’ll follow up and answer as best as we can. The webinar is being recorded and will be sent to all registrants.  Feel free to download our free resource in the GoToWebinar console. It’s a PDF version of today’s presentation and also stay tuned for more tracking related resources from Refersion over the following weeks.

And we encourage you to join some of our polls during our presentation. This gives us a great opportunity to understand who’s on the call today and really tailor the conversation to meet your specific needs. There’ll be 3 and I’ll key you when they’re up.  All right. So introductions. My name is Melissa Weir.

I’m the Director of Demand Generation here at Refersion by Pantastic. And I’m really focused on building programs such as this to help our e commerce brands grow their affiliate marketing portfolio. Programs. And I’m so honored to be joined by two colleagues today. I’ll go ahead and let them introduce themselves.

Andre, let’s start with you.  

Andre: Hey everyone. Thanks for joining and for taking the time to be with us today. Um, my name is Andre. I’ve been with Refersion for about four and a half years. I started in a customer success role. Um, and I’ve transitioned to a technical solutions role, which involves helping customers with more technical integrations and projects and things like that. 

Melissa: And I’ll let Eugenia speak for herself.  

Eugenia: Hi everyone, excited to be here today as well. I’ve been with Refersion for about four months now. Been in the industry for seven years managing publisher relationships. I am the publisher account director for Refersion  and basically I talk to publishers all day, every day. 

Melissa: So excited to have both of you here. I think we’ll get really interesting perspectives from that technical side and also that business side for the brands and the partners. So thank you both for joining us.  So for folks that are new to Refersion, we’ll tell you a little bit about Refersion before we jump into today’s content.

We at Refersion know that it’s complicated to run an effective affiliate marketing program. There’s a lot of moving parts, a lot of different partners, lots of things to do. So Refersion introduces simplicity into managing your program by helping you track every affiliate type that you’d like to work with from publishers, creators, influencers, and ambassadors, And helping you manage each component of your program.

That can be campaigns and management, creating advanced offers for specific commission structures, different partners, and different campaigns that you’re running. Attribution and first party tracking, which we’ll talk a lot about today. And helping you pay your partners on time, very critical to your relationships with partners,  giving you data insights and helping you maintain privacy policies,  giving you deep integrations into your existing tech stack so that you can really integrate your affiliate marketing program with your broader marketing strategy,  and of course, supporting recruitment and partner onboarding. 

The value of managing all of these components in one platform is multifaceted and ultimately it helps you to drive more revenue in your affiliate marketing program. So you can grow your affiliate program. If you understand with reliable tracking. What’s working, what partners are driving the most revenue, what campaigns and what offers seem to be resonating best that gives you really robust reporting, allows you to focus and optimize in what’s working and kind of cut out the things that maybe aren’t as successful and allows you to increase efficiencies.

You can kind of manage everything in one place. It allows for, you know, more time spent on strategy and optimization and less time, maybe trying to. To track things down manually and make sense of what you’re working with. So this end to end solution, you know, really helps you to drive more revenue and focus on growth. 

So Refersion has been around for a decade. And over that time we’ve seen a lot of scale, not only for Refersion, but for our brand partners as well as our affiliate partners. So we’ve had more than 60,000 registered merchants sign up for Refersion to grow or launch their programs. We process hundreds of thousands of dollars in orders daily.

We have more than 6 million registered affiliates on the platform. And from a commissions and revenue perspective, we track quite a bit with more than 300 million affiliate commissions and over one billion affiliate revenue tracked. So some pretty great numbers. And these are just a few of our e-commerce brands that work with Refersion today.

And we support any brand on one of the leading e-commerce platforms and many more. There’s just a few listed here that we integrate really easily with, but we also integrate with custom sites. So if you’re curious and you have a custom site, don’t hesitate to reach out. Um, but, you know, we cover kind of the breadth of, of integrations with the eCommerce platforms. 

So without further ado, let’s get started and talk about what we’re here to cover. Topics for today will be third party cookies. What are they? Why are they so important? What’s happening in today’s digital landscape that really requires us to focus on third party cookies and and how to kind of overcome some of the impacts to your program that these changes will have and the relationships with partners that you have today and that you will form in the future and what you need in a tracking solution.

Spoiler alert: You do need a tracking platform. So what is it that you should be looking for when you evaluate your current solution or a new solution?  And then we’ll close out today’s session with a live Q and A.  All right, so let’s kick off with some definitions. What is it that we’re talking about today?

3rd party cookies. Andre, would you tell us a little bit more about what this means? And what are some alternatives?  

Andre: Yeah, sure. So, first we want to define the common ways that online activity and campaign performance are tracked. And in particular, we’ll be discussing cookies. 

So cookies, if you’re not familiar, are basically small pieces of text, or you can think of them as data. They’re sent to your browser whenever you visit a website on a device. They’re used to help websites remember information about you to make your experience smoother when interacting with, you know, anyone’s website. And there’s 2 main types of cookies that we want to discuss today. 

First is 3rd party cookies. So they’re placed on your device, but they’re generated by a website other than the one that you’re visiting. So when a web visitor visits your site and others, the third party cookie can track this information and send it to that third party, whoever it is that created the cookie. Typically that’s an advertiser and third party cookies are usually linked to the ads that you’re seeing on the page so that those advertisers and analytic companies can track your browsing history across the web, like across multiple sites – any sites that contain their ads.

So compare or contrast those with first party cookies, which are created by the website that you’re actually visiting. With first party tracking, the person that’s creating the cookie can still learn about the user – like what they did while visiting your site, how many times they visited. They can gain other basic analytics about, you know, who you are and what you do and develop or automate an effective marketing strategy with that information.

But they can’t see the data that’s related to your behavior on other websites that aren’t affiliated with your domain. 

Melissa: Why is this coming up for us now?  

Andre: Sure, so to address the elephant in the room, why are we discussing this?  This has been a topic for a little while about  a cookie-less future. It’s not anything super new, but it’s becoming more relevant because in 2024, Chrome is going to finalize its deprecation of third party cookies.

It’s actually a little bit, behind the times with other, browsers such as Mozilla and Safari who are already blocking third party tracking by default. and this is relevant because Chrome has the largest market share in terms of internet browsers. So it’s definitely going to have the largest impact out of all of these browsers.

It’s going to affect Like 60 percent of, you know, web surfers; it’s going to have a massive impact across the digital marketing landscape.  

Melissa: And this is something that, you know, Google has been talking about, as you mentioned, Andre, for quite some time. And I think it’s just kind of been this phantom idea. And now as of January, it’s. It’s starting. So  yeah, it’s, it’s here.  

Andre: Yeah. Um,  by Q3, apparently.  

Melissa: Yeah,  we got some time.  Um, so let’s talk more about how this impacts affiliate marketing. I think there’s been a lot of discussion about how this could impact, you know, kind of digital advertising and different advertisers, as you mentioned, too. Let’s talk about how this can impact an affiliate program.  

Eugenia: Sure. So with the impact of brands, there’s multiple things. Of course, the number one thing that I can think of that it’s going to have the highest impact is really lack of trust within the affiliate programs and lack of trust amongst publishers with the brands. The inability for you to track accurately with your publishers will lead them to feel like they’re not getting the full attribution for all the sales that they’re driving to your site. Um, and this can result in a lot of things such as, like, for strategy decisions and like inaccurate data. So if I’m a merchant or if I’m a brand and I’m working with a specific publisher and I’m having inaccurate tracking I may put more money towards another publisher that’s not doing as much, but it may seem like they’re giving me more sales.

So then you’re wondering why your program is not as big or robust as it may seem. However, it’s because you don’t have the proper tracking in place to actually accurately see which of these publishers are giving you the highest volume of sales. So that’s definitely one of the things that’s important to have in mind as you’re thinking about the impact on your brand and affiliates will want to be looking for reassurance, right? They want to see that. Hey, I have accurate tracking in place that they’re getting  everything that they deserve in terms of commissions that you guys are offering with their program. 

So one of the best things that you really can do is just to try to be as proactive as possible, build the relationship with their affiliates and talk to them about, like, the different ways of tracking that they would prefer. 

I don’t know about you, Andre.  

Andre: Um, yeah, just to add on to that. I mean, when someone is opening a new Refersion account, setting up the tracking is kind of like the most important thing. You know, at the end of the day, affiliates, they want to work with you, they want to promote your brand.  It needs to be a professionally run program and the tracking has to work. That’s like the core thing. So everything else comes after that.  

Melissa: Right, it sounds like you guys are really speaking to the fact that the tracking is a foundation, right? And without the foundation, it’s really hard to build the rest of the house.  They’re likely to crumble. 

I thought it was really interesting, Eugenia, you mentioned about the partnership side and how those publishers can make decisions about who they want to work with. Right? So it could impact maybe a partner you’re already working with, but it also sounds like it can impact your ability to recruit new partners in the future and kind of damaging that reputation.

Eugenia: 100 percent! Affiliates don’t want to do a bunch of work and not get paid. You know, they have to basically talk to their senior leadership team, push for additional resources, whether they’re creating content, whether they’re creating videos or any sort of ways in which that they’re promoting your product.

So if they’re not getting a return on their investment, they may choose not to work with particular brands. And the industry is really small. Like, the publisher world is super small and everybody talks and discusses which are the best programs to be a part of, which programs have certain issues. And, of course, they may choose not to join your program because of the inaccurate tracking, because they’re not getting the best return on their investment. 

Melissa: So, it sounds like, you know, you could run into issues with making decisions about your current program – how to optimize it, what’s working, what’s not working – which could stunt your growth.

And then also, you’d have potentially really difficult time recruiting new high value partners, because they don’t want to work with a program that doesn’t have reliable tracking. So it sounds like, you know, current and future is at stake. So that’s really interesting.  

Eugenia: Exactly. Like high value partnerships such as Future or Ziff Davis or CNN, like all these are major publications that want to see proper tracking in place if they’re going to be driving traffic to your site. 

Melissa: And, Eugenia, what’s a good way to, like … obviously, you could be reactive, right? If there’s a publisher that reaches out and says, hey, you know, I was making X last month, and this month, my commissions look different. What are some other ways to engage publishers, to kind of get ahead of it?

Eugenia: Of course, and it’s more so about being proactive as the brand. Look at your traffic numbers, look at your conversions that are coming in, look at the commissions that you’ve been giving out to your publishers. Are you seeing a dip? Was this the top publisher before? The third party cookie deprecation, and now they’re going down? 

Make a point to, like, have monthly calls with your top performing publishers. Try to understand exactly what they’re doing. Is it because of, like, a lack of tracking, or is it because they’re looking for other ways to optimize with you? So, definitely very important to have that communication with the affiliates.  

Melissa: Awesome.  So first off, if you’re looking at building that solid foundation that we talked about and starting with tracking, you know, what kind of tracking do you need to implement and what should you look for in a provider that offers tracking for affiliates? Andre, I think you would be best suited to kick us off.  

Andre: Yeah. So to bring us back to, you know, the topic at hand about a cookie-less future, you’re going to have to find a platform that tracks your program using first party data. That’s just how the general landscape is going to be shifting. Very soon, if not right now.

So preferably if you’re going to target a new platform, you want one that has proven experience with first party tracking, and you know, we’re from Refersion, so we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna lie. We’re going to highlight the strengths of our platform. Refersion has been using first party tracking for 10 years, but in general you know, that’s something that you want to look for.

Um, and there’s other best practices in terms of features and things to look out for as well, that we’re going to touch on. 

Eugenia: Awesome. And to add on to what you’re saying, Andre, is just to pay attention to any claims from affiliates about their performance. If it needs to be accurately tracked, look to your coupon codes or anything like that. And check if it’s like, you’re seeing a decline or any sort of performance decline, have conversations with the affiliates and try to understand how things are going in terms of performance, and how you guys can best work together. You might want to optimize with them by, like, taking more part in their social media or other forms of marketing that they can offer to you that’s outside of just the typical commission based strategy. 

Melissa: And Andre to one of the things you mentioned was or I see here too is, is, you know, the 1st, party tracking is really tracking on your own domain. So it sounds like, when you have 1st, party tracking, and let’s say, there’s a referral link that your affiliate or publisher is leveraging, that you’ll, you’ll point them to a website or a web page on your domain, which I think, you know, really inspires more trust from the consumer, right? And ensures that they have a consistent checkout experience versus not really knowing where they’re going to be directed to or directing them into an intermediate page. And that can really ensure a smooth kind of checkout for them and helping that conversion maintain as Eugenia was saying, you know, with your affiliate partners. 

Andre: Yeah, I’m not super familiar with other platforms, but I know that some of them make it so that affiliates have to join their network, which is a different topic. But then they have links that have a redirect. They don’t point directly to the merchants website or domain. With Refersion, the real goal is to have or to allow merchants to have a direct relationship with their affiliates. We don’t really want to be the middleman there. So the affiliate links point directly to the merchant’s website. It’s a lot more clear what’s happening in that case. There’s no, you know, additional website where you don’t know what’s going on. That’s kind of one of the benefits of first party tracking. 

Melissa: All right, another piece of this solid foundation tracking obviously feeds into reporting and data analytics. So tell us a little bit more about what to look for in that component.  

Andre: Yeah, in general Eugenia was touching on this, but you want to have, you know, a platform that tracks accurately, because you need to make informed decisions about your program and, you know, next steps and stuff like that. And with first party tracking, another benefit is typically if you’re going to use a platform, it has to integrate directly with your website, and that kind of gives the platform more flexibility with real time reporting and giving you the information that you need to make those informed decisions. 

So, from there, it’s kind of, you know, whatever goals you want to set. Do you need to track performance by partner or by campaign?  Like groups of partners? You can do trend analysis, depending on how long your program has been running – something like month over month  – see where you’re going and kind of set some goals from there. You know, do that by campaign or do that by specific affiliates. 

And of course you want the tracking to be seamless, smooth, automated, so that the attribution can happen automatically. That takes a huge step out of the process. And then from there, you can easily review and approve commissions and pay affiliates, you know, make all of those core functionalities as easy as possible. 

Melissa: Yeah, this, this is a nod to what you were saying to earlier, Eugenia, about, you know, even looking up-funnel at the traffic that’s coming in and being able to see your performance across all those key indicators of the funnel versus just that, you know, what’s the commission amount so that you can be proactive in your relationships. 

Eugenia: Exactly. And remember, like, with working with a network such as Refersion, you get quality and quantity, right? You get, it’s not just about volume, but when you’re onboarding new partners, you also get to have a trial-and-error, because you know that those conversions are being tracked accurately.

So you’re able to tell, okay, these are my top performing affiliates. These are some affiliates that I may not want to work with. Those are all opportunities that are available when you’re on a network such as Refersion.  And also, like, being able to change up your strategy; you can change your commission rates, such as what Andre was saying. You can provide a flat fee to larger affiliates that are looking to write content about you. So many different ways that you can really look at your strategy once your tracking is in place. 

Melissa: Which is a great bridge, Eugenia. It’s almost like you knew this slide was next, but  there’s obviously a lot of other components that you should look at and evaluate when you’re thinking about a tracking solution, because again, having management all in one place really provides those efficiencies and ability to grow.

So, I have a few points here, if Andre, you could kick us off with the first one and walk us through how to evaluate solutions for these key components.  

Andre: Yeah, sure thing. So, you know, like I said, we want to highlight the strengths of the Refersion platform, but these are definitely things that you should look out for, you know, wherever you want to take your affiliate program.

Integrations are a big part because, well, I talked about integrating directly with your website. You want to make that as seamless as possible because that can be, you know, a prolonged process depending on your e-commerce platform. So make sure you’re looking for a platform that’s a good fit for what you already have set up. You don’t want to change a lot of different things. 

And on top of that, you’re probably using a lot of different apps already for different functionalities. Maybe you’re using something to pay your affiliates or using something to communicate with your affiliates or you’re using a CRM or something – there’s all types of different apps and tools out there.

So you’re going to want a tracking platform that has a lot of integrations and maybe it can, you know, communicate with those different platforms that you’re already using. Um, so, you know, platforms that you already like that you’re kind of your favorites, keep those, you know, in your stack and you don’t have to like change that much. 

On top of that it’s not just about your experience, of course, it’s about the affiliates’ experience too. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to get everything that they need, make the onboarding as smoothly and clearly communicated as possible. If you have a lot of resources you need to share with your affiliates, whether that’s like brand assets or different ways that you can allow them to track offers – that’s link or coupon code – give that to them and all in one place in like, a couple of emails or newsletters or an affiliate dashboard ideally where they can log in and get everything that they need.  

To touch on those, multiple tracking options, if that is something that you’re going to pursue, then you would want that to be automated in your tracking platform Links aren’t the only way that you can track referrals. You know, a lot of like TikTok and Instagram, it’s really hard to share links on those platforms due to how they’re designed. So coupon codes is something that you want to be able to track easily as well. 

And then whatever other flexible options you want to do, if you want to track a lifetime commission using customer email, you could track loyalty referrals as well, if you’re like working with a partner closely.  So all of this to help your existing affiliates, people that you’re already working with.

And then something Eugenia knows a lot about would be affiliate discovery. You know, do you have a platform that’s going to help you facilitate growing the program and finding new affiliates and, you know, recruitment and all things like that.  

And support for you and your affiliates, you are going to have questions about the platform, especially if it can do a lot of things. Same thing for affiliates. They might just have simple questions about, like, how do I find my link or, how do I contact my merchant. But they might have some more open ended questions, like, how can I drive more traffic, things like that.

So, definitely you want to give your affiliates and yourself as many resources as you need, to answer all of your pressing questions as fastly, quickly as possible.  

Eugenia: Exactly, couldn’t have said it better myself, Andre.  

Andre: Thank you. 

Melissa: The hassle free partner onboarding… You mentioned Andre, just making it really simple for partners to kind of sign up and get started and it’s bringing back this notion Eugenia brought up earlier around, you know, like, even thinking about conversion, multiple different phases of the funnel. It sounds like there’s also a partner recruitment funnel, right? 

So you have to kind of reach out to partners. You need to discover them. And then how do you convert them to becoming a partner? And it sounds like, you know, that onboarding processes is a big part of maybe building that relationship up front. Can you tell us more about that, Eugenia?  

Eugenia: Yes, of course. So, like, once you’ve started onboarding, of course, you’re thinking to yourself. Oh, my God. How do I find all these affiliates? You know, where do I get them from?

And that’s part of where the support comes from. You know, that’s part of where I do what I do in terms of talking to publishers and getting the relationships and understanding so that when you’re coming to us, when you’re onboarding on to Refersion, you can say something like, Hey, I want to work with some of these affiliates and like, how do we get them?

So that’s the part where we start building those relationships for you, facilitating those introductions, and then you take it from there, right? We’re not here to play middleman or anything like that. We’re there for you to understand how you want to facilitate the relationship with the publisher and it’s up to you on the conversations that you want to have with them.

So it’s very important that you’re proactive in talking to them, understanding exactly what their needs are, if they’ve changed in terms of their promotional methods and whatever that can help benefit your program at the end of the day is something you want to take advantage of.  

Melissa: Yeah, and also like, you know, once you’ve had that conversation, it’s a good fit, how do you get them onto your affiliate marketing platform? Making that process really easy too. You know, they don’t have to fill out some crazy form or, you know, you as the brand don’t have to import this massive thing and, you know, it takes all this data entry. So making that actual sign up process really easy for them, friction free. Think about it as like a consumer, where you want to make that checkout experience really seamless.

Eugenia: Exactly. I’ve had publishers come to me and they’re like, this signup form is way too long and they’re not going to fill this out because, you know, they’re so big that they can say that. So sometimes it’s easier to just have them like quickly apply. 

That’s the beauty of affiliate marketing, right? Everything is based on performance. So if they’re not doing well for you, you can also take them off the program. But once you find out that they are doing well for you, you can double down on those relationships, have conversations with them and find the best way to optimize as well. 

Melissa: All right. So closing out today’s session, we’re, we’re moving towards the live Q and A. But just a few key takeaways, from today’s session, you know, poor tracking, it doesn’t just hurt you. It also hurts your partners. It hurts you more actually, without reliable tracking. It’s really hard to see the full impact of your relationships and also just how your program is doing and retaining those high quality affiliates that were once generating a lot of revenue for you. So you really are kind of kneecapping yourself if you cannot track reliably. 

The next one is to understand how you’re tracking. So if you’re already leveraging a solution, take a look under the hood, understand how the tracking works. Make sure that you are future proofed for third party cookie deprecation. And also, you know, understand maybe some of your other tools too, while you’re at it, and make sure that your full marketing strategy is kind of ready for some of these changes. 

And if your tracking systems aren’t in a place where you need them to be, do your homework. You know, really take more time to understand what you need in an affiliate marketing solution for your individual program.  Lots of programs look really different. You might have the same goals for the kinds of partners that you work with or the kinds of offers that you offer might vary. So really making sure that whatever solution you use aligns with your individual program.

And get ready to grow, you know, as we talked about today, this is really the foundation of setting up a successful program and there’s a lot more that goes into it.

So I think Eugenia did a great job and kind of giving us a window into some of the ongoing management and support that needs to be done to maintain those relationships. But there’s a lot more to be done, and Refersion has a lot of great programs coming up this year to help you through all those different parts of managing a program.

All right. If you’re not ready to have a one to one chat, there’s a lot of other virtual learning sessions that we offer. One being a Refersion Live demo. If you’d like to look more under Refersion’s hood and learn how we track affiliate programs, go ahead and sign up for our next session. We run them every two weeks.

And every Friday, you can catch the Refersion team live for a Q and A, if you have any questions, an expert will be available to answer those for you about the platform. If you have questions about your program and maybe a specific area that you’re working on.  So I’ll leave those up here for a second before we kind of click away, but let’s go ahead and take some questions from the audience.

So go ahead. There’s just a questions tab here on the go to webinar platform and fill those in and we will get to those. 

Andre: Just to add something in too, since, you know, Eugenia has been here and she’s been providing the insight from the publisher side. I previously did a webinar with someone from one of our partners, Publisher Discovery, and what he said really resonated with me when merchants are reaching out to publishers and trying to build those relationships.

You know, the risk is kind of on the publisher’s side. You know, you as a merchant are concerned with your brand, but the publisher is concerned with their brand as well. They want to promote a merchant that is going to track their sales and reward them, you know, accurately, right? So that’s definitely something that you want to keep in mind when you’re figuring out if your tracking is reliable. It’s not just about your brand, it’s also about the affiliates you work with and the risk that they have to take on.  

Eugenia: 100 percent. There’s a saying that we have that I always tell my publishers: if it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work for me. Essentially, it has to be an audience fit. They have to see some sort of conversions happening. They don’t just promote anything and everything. It has to make sense. And because of that, it takes more resources on their part to have it even ranking on Google. 

Melissa: All right. Our first question, through the chat. So this is an interesting one we didn’t already cover.  Will first party cookies be phased out as well?  

Andre: I can answer that. The answer is no. Basically at this time, there’s no intention to phase out first party cookies from platforms. They’re kind of necessary to enhance your experience on websites and there’s kind of not a risk of them being phased out just because they’re a lot less… generally speaking, they’re, they’re less intrusive in terms of collecting data. 

Melissa: All right, another technical one for you, Andre. You’re on the spot. Does the concept of cookie window duration go away when third party cookies are gone?  

Andre: No, cookie window honestly is a little bit of a misleading term, but it’s kind of like an umbrella term just to make it easy for people to understand. We can think of it as like an attribution window. You know, if, if I share a link to Melissa’s store and someone clicks it and buys right away, it’s pretty obvious that I referred that sale. 

But let’s say I drove someone to Melissa’s store and they kind of like browse around, but they don’t come back until a couple weeks later to make their purchase. Then it’s a little bit less clear if I was the actual referral there. Maybe something else caused them to make that purchase. Either way the cookie window is generally going to be a month. It could be longer, could be shorter. Depends on your product. With 1st party cookies you can still track that. You can still set your cookie window to whatever. 

Melissa: All right, a few more. Will removing Chrome’s 3rd party cookies affect Refersion tracking? Andre, I think you’re up again. 

Andre: Okay. I wasn’t sure. The answer is no, plain and simple. There’s nothing you need to be worried about. We don’t leverage cookies. We don’t leverage third party cookies, one, and we also use local storage to do tracking. So, no, you don’t have to worry about anything.

Melissa: Awesome.  All right. And then what is the reason, do we know the reason behind the elimination of the third party cookies? 

Andre: Is that also me? 

Melissa: I think it’s going to be you.  

Andre: No worries. Um, there’s kind of a long answer for this. Again, it’s kind of been a hot topic for like a little while now. So not just this year, but in previous years, there’s more and more heightened concerns over privacy and data protection. These are not old measures, but you know, GDPR, CCPA, those are kind of indicative of a broad movement towards valuing user privacy and securing consent, in gathering customer data, and data gathering processes.

So this is just kind of another rung in the ladder in terms of that whole process about, you know, valuing privacy and data protection.  

Melissa: Awesome. All right. We have several questions. All right, here we go. We use Refersion. How does this work when we are in the public marketplace and are part of a sub network like Skimlinks that has, you know, other magazine sites like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, et cetera? 

Andre: I think that’s a Eugenia question.

Eugenia: That is a Eugenia question. So Skimlinks works very uniquely. So they’re considered a sub affiliate. And essentially, that means that they try to onboard as many merchants as possible. Publishers can also join the Skimlinks platform as well and choose to work with multiple merchants that are on Skimlinks.

So it’s not 100 percent guaranteed that these large publishers, such as the Harper’s Bazaar, or even Condé Nast will be working with you through Skimlinks. I always recommend a direct relationship with these bigger publishers. One, because Skimlinks takes a cut out of their commission. And two, if they’re working with you directly, they get 100 percent of their commission and you get to improve the relationship with them directly.

So it’s not necessarily guaranteed. But if there’s other publishers that Skimlinks is working with and they see your, your brand on Skimlinks. They’ll apply and Skimlinks will let them, you know, have their tracking links and be able to promote your product as well. 

Melissa: Gotcha.  Thank you. I’m, so glad you entered into the questions pool or the answering pool. All right another one. Our partners’ Refersion referral links are getting stripped by privacy browsers like DuckDuckGo. We verified they aren’t getting credit for those sales. Should we not be using those links anymore?

Eugenia: You can definitely change your links like you need to. Um, if you don’t want to pay specific ones, like they just won’t get paid for it. So I don’t really worry about that, but this is more technical too on Andre’s side.  

Andre: Yeah, so there are…  DuckDuckGo, I didn’t know it was a browser. I thought it was a search engine, but Brave is a browser that is very privacy focused, and there are, you know, plugins that you can install on Chrome to make your experience more privacy focused as well. So it’s tough to find a one size fits all tracking solution. 

We always recommend testing things. So if you see that something is happening in a specific, you know, customer checkout experience or customer journey, how can you accommodate that kind of customer so that their purchases are tracked? Maybe you need to do some kind of other link tracking. Refersion’s, default tracking, relying on local storage is very easy to set up, but there’s other ways that you could match conversions to clicks. You could use IP address. you could – it would take some developer resources, but you could write some code to capture, the affiliate parameter in a different way and attribute the sale.

You could always just go back to coupon codes. If it’s an affiliate that’s really large and you want to maintain that relationship, just give them a code and keep it easy and you don’t have to worry about link tracking. So you just have to, you know, be aware of your options and maybe pursue some potential solutions if needed. 

Melissa: All right, another question about link tracking. So if someone is using Refersion, but they create custom Bitly links, are those considered third party or first party?  

Andre: the link, I guess a Bitly link would be considered third party? Um, that’s a good question, honestly. 

It’s a redirect in the way that it just sends you to like the merchants website anyways, and it is kind of helpful because a lot of social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook they’re going to have security redirects through the links anyways, that could cause our tracking to get lost or cause like any tracking to get lost in a link.

So Bitly is definitely helpful in that case. The fact that it is just like a different website is not really that much of a problem. Eventually the customer is going to land on your website with the tracking parameters and then our first party tracking would run. Um, so to be honest, I don’t know if it would be considered a third party link, but it wouldn’t be third party tracking at the end of the day. I don’t know if that helps. 

Melissa: So it sounds like since it’s going to that domain, it still would capture the first party data on that page nce they land there.  

Andre: Yeah.  

Melissa: Awesome. That’s a great question.  How will cookie tracking impact product returns? Is there a special way we need to track cookies for returns to avoid paying commissions on returned products? 

Andre: I would consider that kind of two different topics, well, two different steps. First you would want your tracking to be reliable so you can track, you know, the conversion in the first place, because, you know, without a conversion, you can’t worry about something being returned. Um, so that’s kind of where this concept of first party tracking is super important. You want to get that figured out. 

Once your tracking is reliable, then it would be a separate kind of unrelated thing to worry about you know, orders that get canceled and stuff like that. it would depend on your e-commerce platform. Um, Does, for example, with the version and, Shopify and also with, WooCommerce, if an order gets canceled, the store is able to, to know that the original order was a conversion. So it’ll send us updated information to let us know that the order was canceled. You’re not going to have to pay duplicate commission in that way. It doesn’t honestly really have that much to do with, cookies or tracking. Um, it would be more so whether your store is like communicating information with Refersion about canceled orders. 

Melissa: Awesome. We have, we’re going to squeeze one more question in here. We have a few more. So if we didn’t get to you, we will, we will follow up. Could you give some examples of third party cookies that are used for affiliate marketing? Like generally?  

Andre: I’m not super familiar just cause, you know, I’ve been with Refersion a while and it’s first party and I just don’t know a lot of our other competitors. But Google Analytics and Facebook or Meta… I don’t even know what it’s called. Like Meta Events manager or something like that. Like you know, tracking click activity in platforms like that. I think that would be considered third party because you’re tracking like the customer’s journey over multiple different visits and stuff like that. So you’re kind of piecing it together to figure out that they’ve been referred in a specific way. And I know that that’s a very highly used tracking attribution model. That kind of thing is definitely going to face some problems with the deprecation of third party cookies.  

Melissa: And it sounds like, too, any intermediary experience that’s not directing the consumer, right to that domain, could open up some gaps. Is that right?  

Andre: Yeah. Um, I mean, it’s kind of black and white. Like does the platform use first party or third party? If it uses first party tracking, that’s fine. If it uses third party tracking, that’s probably not going to work anymore. So, you know, it’s plain and simple in that regard.  

Melissa: Where are things so clear? So that’s helpful. All right, First off, I got the green light. We can go a few minutes longer. So folks that still want to hang on, we have a few more questions,  but we have one question about the Brave browser. I know you mentioned earlier, Andre, that they are very privacy centric. This question is, do you know if the Brave browser will remove third party cookies?  

Andre: So Brave is a very, very privacy focused Internet browser. The, the question is, does it remove third party cookies? It definitely does by default. I don’t know if you can even change. You probably could to change the settings to allow stuff like that, but the whole point of someone using the browser is to like, to not be tracked at all. And also I think it has built-in functionality to block ads, stuff like that. So it’s just a very privacy focused browser. 

Melissa: Okay, awesome.  I think, let me just see, I’m getting questions from like different platforms that you guys are writing in so just bear with me. Um, just want to make sure we get.  All right.  

Yeah, it sounds like you know a lot of these scenarios that we’ve talked about to like in the questions and also just throughout the presentation is like, you can do everything right, but we just cannot control the end user. So there’s always, you know, opportunities for an end user to kind of, sneak in one way or the other. But, you know, it’s all about setting up your program  for high reliability.  

Well, I think that’s it. Um, if we didn’t get to your questions, we will follow up over email. We thank you guys so much for joining us today. We hope you found this session valuable. Again you can download the presentation there on the go to our console and you’ll also get a recording within the next 24 hours.

So thank you again. Thank you, Eugenia. Thank you, Andre, for all of your expertise. And we hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.