PI LIVE hit London this week with a packed agenda with attendees from across Europe and North America. The two days offered a diverse series of topics with a focus on three key trends:
- The effect of AI in all parts of the affiliate marketing ecosystem
- Trends in influencer marketing
- Changes in tracking
The headline session featured Adam Ross of Awin, with the challenging title of "No More Free Sales" and announcing the Awin stance on ensuring that advertisers upgrade their tracking, as part of their Conversion Protection Initiative, to address tracking gaps and ensure affiliates receive fair compensation.
You can read more on the Conversion Protection Initiative on the Awin blog.
Tracking and Consent
One of the best attended sessions was with Moonpull founder, Steven Brown and James Little of TopCashback discussing issues around Consent and Deprecation.
Steve outlined the technical side of how tracking was changing, and Moonpull's at-scale ability to appraise the presence of the "memory cookie" which he explained was perhaps the most important component to understand with regards to effective tracking.
The effect that user consent has on tracking and conversion has been growing in importance over the last few years and Steve and James both shared valuable insights. Steve shared that around 30% of browser use is via iOS or Safari where third-party cookies are not read -- and so will not track. As only 25-50% of users accept cookies, that means that around 18% of referrals have not been tracked since the ITP changes.
User consent is a major factor in the UK and Europe and increasingly in North America, as privacy legislation is being enacted in more and more US states.
The effect of a consent banner is clearly demonstrated in the Moonpull Browser Extension video, which shows the different results when a user opts to either Accept or Decline cookies.
James also shared some of the internal research at TopCashback, drawing on data from the affiliate networks, their own BI and Moonpull auditing. This has enabled them to understand issues that arise more fully and move towards systematically monitoring their leading advertiser partnerships via their tracking working group.
Where issues arise, they can be shared with the advertiser for a discussion to work towards a resolution.
The session ended with a series of questions around tracking and consent from a well informed and engaged audience.
Tracking Clinic
As part of the Table Talks sessions at PI LIVE, the Moonpull team led a tracking clinic, with senior figures from several leading publishers. This led to a wide ranging and highly engaging discussion, and sharing their experience of the effect of consent on tracking.
Steve and Lorena shared insights into how some of the most active Moonpull users were using the platform and the data, setting up internal working groups as outlined above, and often hiring staff specifically to manage the analysis.
This enables publishers to deal with issues as they arise and share their analysis with advertisers so they can be resolved quickly.
Steve shared the development of Moonpull Certification, to help affiliate management agencies to gain a better understanding of their clients tracking and consent; and to demonstrate to publishers that the program is being proactively managed to ensure that the tracking is set up correctly.
He announced that Moonpull will be holding another publisher round table discussion in November. This will be to listen to publishers own requirements in the Certification program.
The next few months and the coming year should see some interesting developments in the wider affiliate industry. The three focuses of this year's conference that we outlined above are all areas where significant changes are happening -- all of which is of course subject to the changes in tracking and consent.
UPDATE: Read about "How User Consent Took Center Stage" at Affiliate Summit West 2025.