Affiliate website without cookies - how it works

By Unknown Monday, November 25, 2019

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Affiliate website without cookies - how it works

The topic "cookies and privacy" I've already discussed here in the blog. A recent ECJ judgment has now made the situation worse and the upcoming ePrivacy regulation still casts its shadow

It may well be that you can no longer set cookies in the future without the active consent of visitors

What exceptions there are and how you can earn good money with his affiliate website even without cookies, you will learn in my today's article

Note

Of course, the following hints and tips are only my personal opinion and describe my approach. I do not guarantee that you will be on the legally safe side. Nobody can guarantee that

Does Affiliate Marketing work without cookies

Here is basically the first question, whether Affiliate Marketing works without cookies at all

Many affiliate programs use cookies to identify which customer has been sent to the store from which affiliate. Only then can a remuneration be paid to the affiliate

To set such a cookie with the users, there are 2 possibilities

The cookie is already set on the affiliate website and the online store then recognizes from which affiliate that person came

The cookie is first set in the online shop. The visitor was "sent" to the shop with a special affiliate link containing the ID of the affiliate as a parameter

Without cookies, affiliate marketing will not work, because at least in the shop itself, the shop owner must be able to "track" the user. After all, it may well be that the user puts something in the shopping cart, then looks at 5 other products and so on, before he makes a purchase. At this point, however, the shop must still be able to recognize from which affiliate the customer was sent

You will see whether cookies are no longer necessary in affiliate marketing. There are already technologies that could replace the cookie, but nothing has been enforced yet

In my comments but you can also recognize that you can operate an affiliate website without cookies. And so I have collected many own experiences in the last year

Why not use cookies

Before I get to how to do without cookies on their own website, I go to the question of why you should even waive cookies

Data protection in the EU and thus also in Germany is getting tougher. It is in itself nice that more emphasis is put on the protection of the data, even if one may be quite divided about some measures. But it is clear that the requirements for website operators are also increasing

Many lawyers today already believe that every cookie requires an opt-in, ie the prior consent of the user. Although the DS-GVO provides, in addition to the consent, other possibilities, e.g. the consideration of "legitimate interests" and the fulfillment of contracts, but nevertheless the development goes well that nothing works without a consent

The current Rechtsspechung is there also quite rigorous and so the ECJ has recently allowed the Facebook button only with previous opt-in. Many a lawyer believes it is now clear that every cookie requires an opt-in

In any case, there should be an opt-out, so that you can deactivate the cookie setting in retrospect. But that is not so easy to implement in Affiliate Marketing. It is laborious and difficult to control. How do you want to make sure it always works? Therefore, I see opt-outs quite susceptible to problems and thus, e.g. also for warnings

In addition, it will sooner or later come to a mandatory opt-in (keyword ePrivacy Regulation) and then I prefer to customize your own website today so that no more cookies are necessary. What happens in the shops, I honestly do not care, so I do not have to worry anymore

Incidentally, statistics tracking is also a privacy issue. As soon as personal data is collected in order to "track" individual users, an opt-in will probably sooner or later be unavoidable

Cool advertising without cookies and tracking

If you install Amazon product images directly via the Amazon code (site stripe), no cookies are set, but the user's IP is sent to the Amazon servers. This is a tracking possible and so you would have to get a first consent here

But there are some Amazon plugins that allow beautiful ads without cookies and tracking

Personally, I prefer the plugin AAWP, which I use everywhere. This brings various pretty advertising without cookies and prevents, for example. also IP tracking through an integrated proxy

My experiences

I've been running my affiliate websites for more than a year without cookies and tracking. Apart from the VG word cookie

During this time, I have not been able to detect a decline in revenue, everything is going as usual. The visitor numbers according to Statify are also correct

Due to the radical expansion of cookies, these websites are now much easier to maintain and I am much more relaxed than I would have been with a complex opt-in solution. There are always changes, new documentation requirements, changes in the privacy policy and so on. All this is spared me since I simply removed the services that set cookies. I am a pragmatist and prefer less work

Here in the blog I have just run a test on Google Analytics. I use the plugin Pixelmate * to implement an opt-in for Google Analytics. There is a significant decline in visitor numbers according to Google Analytics. Statify shows, however, that this is not the case and visitor numbers are stable

This simply means that many users refuse the cookies and thus the Google Analytics statistics are worthless and many advertising materials might not work properly anymore

That's why I prefer to do without the cookie setting through affiliate advertising and Google Analytics. I'm going better with that