I have blogged about the problem of disabled cookies, and how situations when the end users refuse to accept cookies may hurt the affiliate tracking. In my response I have mentioned that there is one “if” and that is “if the platform chosen by the merchant relies on cookies for tracking” then the tracking will be affected.
There are, on the other hand, platforms — and by “platforms” I mean both affiliate software, and affiliate networks — that do not depend on cookies for tracking. Tracking may also be based on the end-user’s IP, or be URL-based (when affiliate IDs are being embedded in each URL), or incorporate a number of other solutions that aren’t tied to cookies.
Here’s a brief list of software providers and affiliate networks that support cookie-less affiliate tracking:
Software:
Affiliate Networks:
If you know of any other cookie-less (or cookie-free) affiliate tracking solution providers, feel free to mention them below, and I’ll happily add them to the above lists.
HasOffers supports:
http iFrame (cookie based, affiliate third party tracking)
https iFrame (cookie based, affiliate third party tracking, pass additional params)
http IMG (cookie based, network tracking only)
https IMG (cookie based, network tracking only, pass additional params)
Server Response (network tracking only, cookie-less)
ClickBank is cookieless??
Could you explain please, as far as I know they are 100% tracking with cookies!
Mario, I know for a fact that ClickBank has been trying cookieless tracking since 2007 [see this post too]. When my above post was originally published, the link to ClickBank’s website had an answer on how exactly it was working. Apparently, they removed that page some time between the 07/28/2009 and now. Not sure if they’re still providing cookieless tracking.
Santu.com uses cookieless tracking for affliates. Each product created gets a short unique URL, such as
http://www.ipod.santu.com
Affiliates selling the same product get completely different URLs for the product, such as abc123.santu.com.
This means the tracking of a product purchase is easily done. Even better, the affiliates get their own checkout process, so that it is impossible for a customer to go to the actual product seller.