Web 2.0 and Cookie-Based Tracking
Posted By Josh Feldman - June 21st, 2009
If you’re an affiliate marketer, or any breed of internet marketer, you are quite familiar with the benefits (and flaws) of cookie-based tracking. Cookies are 100% dependent on the end-user’s browser settings and other machine-level rules. What if a consumer has javascript disabled? Will you still get credited for your conversions?
While, here at AKMG, we implement tracking so that a conversion will be tracked regardless of a user’s machine having javascript / cookies enabled, many do not, and a large number of conversions dissipate into outer-space, all at the loss of the publisher.
Many newer, Web 2.0-esque programming languages function in such a way that a page / page with a form does NOT have to be refreshed to send/receive more data and perform further functions. This is completely new to visitors of older sites / users of older web applications who have become accustomed to the linear and visually tangible process of: “Enter Information –> Submit Information –> Receive New Information,” all occurring in separate page phases in redirection. Web 2.0 languages like AJAX allow all of this to occur on the ’same page’, so that a user never has to ‘move on’ to another page. This can pose a problem for tracking mechanisms that rely largely on the URL redirection process (which usually involve processes similar to GET or POST(ing) form data.
We will be switching over to the new version of our system next month which will allow merchants who plan to have future products/services with AJAX front-ends. On top of pixel tracking (script / noscript), we’ll have clickURL tracking which will track cookie and image pixel free. This is done simply by activating a URL which triggers the same process of a ‘pixel fire’ on the back-end.
Have any more questions about tracking technologies and those that are under development? Let me know!
