“Losing Track” by Brian Quinton (Oct. 15) hit on the problem of consumers deleting cookies, which ruins tracking as well as attribution of sales from search ads. But the story missed a huge issue — crediting partners for sales they generated.
Affiliate partners are Web sites that promote a given site in return for a piece of the sale. They get paid nothing if there's no tracking, as was mentioned in the explanation of how cookie deletion hurts paid search analysis. However, marketers should be feverishly working with firms like LinkShare and Commission Junction to come up with alternate tracking methodologies so their partners receive credit for sales generated despite the use of cookie deletion products. Yet I hear no discussion of this.
Is it because marketers get the sale and then don't have to pay the commission? Is it because firms like LinkShare and Commission Junction might be getting credit for all traffic going through their sites even though the originator of the traffic gets no credit? Or are these firms not making a big deal about it because of pressure from marketers to not tell the affiliates about these issues?
I don't know, and I make no accusations. But I keep wondering why it's so quiet out there. People who send marketers traffic are not being fairly compensated. And so marketers need to remedy this situation. Otherwise, when their partners notice the drop-off in their commission checks, they're going to switch to other sites to promote, perhaps wrongly assuming that they'll be better compensated. In the end, marketers will lose traffic and no one will win.
The article also mentioned educating the consumer about cookies. Waste of time. Ninety-nine percent of users who barely know what words like “virus” and “spyware” mean are terrified of their systems being infected or their behavior being tracked. They use software like LavaSoft's AdAware, Microsoft's AntiSpyware and Patrick Kolla's SpyBot Search and Destroy to delete everything the programs find. You can't educate them.
What you have to do is focus your energies on the companies and individuals that make these products to place these cookies into a “safe” category that explains to users that there's a big benefit to not deleting them. Hard thing to do, but that's the place to focus.
In the meantime, we need a new way to track sales through the channel so that everyone is fairly compensated for their efforts.
Rick Isenberg
President
RBI Direct Marketing Consulting
Chadds Ford, PA
