The Publishers' Viewpoint in the Tracking Conversation
Moonpull founder, Steven Brown was recently asked to explain Moonpull as part of the Innovation Spot at Affiliate Huddle. This highlighted the technical innovation being delivered to add clarity in affiliate tracking.
The team also had the chance to meet up with many old friends in the industry to understand tracking issues from the OPMs' and publishers' viewpoints.
Views on Tracking from Affiliate Huddle
The Moonpull team had a very busy time at the event and we got a chance to meet up with a number of friends and new faces. It gave Steve and the team the chance to gauge the wider understanding of tracking issues that Moonpull is designed to solve.
The OPMs' Viewpoint
There were several of the leading OPM agencies represented at the Huddle. We got to speak to Lee-Ann Johnstone of Affiliate Insider who is active in both the ecommerce and gambling sectors. These offer quite different challenges, particularly in terms of compliance required.
She's convinced that all will have "a really rough ride ahead of us as we try to figure out cookie deprecation and how networks and publishers deal with that. It's very important that we understand that data as well".
Bruce Clayton of Optimus-PM suggested what others have echoed elsewhere, "We take affiliate tracking for granted and clearly it's not doing the job we think it does".
Mihaela Olaru covered a range of the issues affecting tracking in the recent AM Navigator blog post, to illustrate the complexity of any ecommerce transaction. Cookie compliance issues are adding yet another layer of complexity to be managed.
The Publishers' Viewpoint
To give the publishers' view, Ray Wright of uFurnish agreed that tracking can be a major issue. User experience and quality of content is crucial for any publisher. In monetising a website, effective affiliate tracking is also important. He shared that "there's a variability in terms of what tracking looks like, particularly across networks and across different advertisers".
Gavin Male of SLICE Digital commented on how accurate tracking helps all involved in the partnership; "Better earning programs get more traction with publishers, less time wasted on missed transactions for the likes of loyalty and cashback publishers and a better experience for everyone."
Moonpull Innovation
In the Innovation Spot at the Huddle event, Steve highlighted the issues that have come to light during over a year's analysis of multiple advertisers and affiliate networks.
Moonpull analysis across hundreds of user journeys has been designed to identify where issues are happening in the 'handover' from publisher through to advertiser websites. These vary from network to network and advertiser to advertiser, as Ray Wright has identified.
The Moonpull Platform
In the case of advertiser Aesop shown below, via the Ascend (Pepperjam) tracking platform, Moonpull identifies that there is no cookie consent detected though the green 100 tab shows that the cookie was set correctly to track.
With the increasing use of cookie consent technologies, this can become far more complex.
In this example the first tab analysing the initial landing page, shows initial errors with the first party cookie not being set on this first tab. The platform has also identified that the network's JS tag is not present in the DOM.
The second tab shows that once a visitor has Accepted All cookies, the tab is green, indicating that tracking is successful. That changes again on a page refresh.
This enables a publisher, the advertiser's OPM or a network to share a detailed technical fact. This accurate and factual statement can be passed through to the relevant person who can identify the issue and then implement an efficient fix.