Is Your Tracking Prepared for 2024?

The team at Moonpull is frequently asked how to improve affiliate tracking and in many cases it’s more a question about understanding tracking. This has been the theme behind several Linkedin conversations over recent months particularly in the UK market.

The interest shown in the subject at September’s PI LIVE Show panel on tracking with one of the largest audiences of any panel at the event, also indicates that all in the industry are starting to take the issues around consent and third party deprecation are starting to be fully addressed.

Conceptually tracking is simple

An affiliate sends a user to an advertiser and the user buys something generating a commission.? So there is a referral to record, and a sale also to record and allocate to the referral. Therefore a memory is needed between the two as illustrated here:

Embrace the Memory Cookie?

Almost all affiliate tracking has this memory stored in a cookie or local storage. As the checkout page is usually a secure page it generally is reliable (and less likely to suffer inadvertent degradation). Therefore the first question with regards to a tracking issue should usually be ‘is the memory cookie present’? Moonpull published a view on the memory cookie in this article.

Tracking becomes quite complex however as it is adapted to each advertiser’s website and market requirements. The language used to describe the processes and parameters also varies by network and becomes even more complex for advertisers operating in multiple markets. Moonpull’s own approach to terminology in in affiliate tracking is covered in a recent article on Moonpull’s tracking language.

Preparing Tracking for 2024

In addition to pure tracking issues, there are legal constraints from privacy legislation increasingly being introduced requiring cookie consent. Add to this that many marketers are struggling with inaccuracies and inconsistencies between - what many rely on as a source of truth - GA4 and how this often doesn’t tally with the results from the affiliate network reporting. The pressures on affiliate measurement are mounting.

We have tackled these issues, and hope to help marketers overcome these pressures, in an article helping advertisers navigate through 2024 with a better understanding of the questions to ask and the key points to address.

The article is a collection of thoughts for users entitled managing affiliate tracking into 2024 in the Moonpull blog - along with some key elements for a planning checklist to get things moving.

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