2. Overcoming tracking problems
By Cliff Allen
Your article on whether an affiliate program should use cookies or not was very good, but let me add a couple of thoughts.
The way we’ve overcome most of the problems of tracking people with cookies is with bookmarks. We just completed a Web site for Backyard Nature by Design that uses our personalization software, and we included affiliate program tracking into the design of the profile database for long-term tracking.
As a customer enters the site they are assigned a unique ID, cookied, and the affiliate code is stored in their profile. The URL for every page they visit on the site contains their ID so when they bookmark any page they are also saving their unique ID. When they return using either a bookmark or just type in the site’s URL (https://www.BackyardNature.com) they are automatically identified and tracked – and the affiliate receives credit
for any additional purchases.
In addition, the Backyard Nature newsletter has links to the Web site that contain the reader’s ID so when they click a link in the e-mail, it’s just like they used a bookmark with their ID to return to the site.
On the topic of using IP addresses to identify people, that is becoming more and more difficult. As you know, ISPs re-use IP addresses for dial-up customers, which means that a customer is unlikely to be given the same IP address the next time they dial their ISP. In addition, the growing use of proxy servers that convert all users to, say, one IP address confounds the problem because what looks like one user is actually several, or hundreds, or thousands of users.
AOL creates an additional problem because they change proxy servers on a user during a session. Our server log shows AOL users changing IP addresses during a session – while the ID assigned by our software remains the same throughout the session!
Until a new way of identifying people on the Net is invented, it looks like cookies and bookmarks together is the best solution to tracking individual people.
Cliff Allen Experience GuestTrack Web personalization
GuestTrack, Inc. Co-Author: Internet World Guide to
Los Angeles, CA One-to-One Web Marketing
310/558-3599310/558-3599 https://www.GuestTrack.com
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