Due to tracking restrictions and the unstable work of the client-side tracking, your affiliates can lose up to 40% of the commission. It happens because browser tracking is no longer reliable. Apple’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP), and ad blockers restrict the use of third-party cookies. It can be fixed by setting up server-side affiliate conversion tracking.
Stape created an Affiliate Conversion tacog for the server Google Tag Manager to track pageviews and conversions from affiliate partners. By setting up an affiliate pageview event, you take the URL parameter (in most cases, it's either affiliate ID or click ID) and store it in the browser's cookie. You can set the lifetime of this cookie.
When a conversion event triggers, you can fire the affiliate conversion event that sends requests with the configured URL and required parameters.
More conversions will be tracked, meaning more revenue for affiliates. Awin's research analyzed 150,000 tracking calls and saw that 12,6% more cookies were set with the server-side implementation. Most of the time, client-side cookies were blocked by browsers that restrict the use of third-party cookies (like Safari or Firefox) and the rest by ad blockers.
Imagine you have offers in three affiliate networks, each requiring its tracking code. This means adding three separate JavaScript tags to your site, which can slow down its performance.
When you add affiliate JavaScript to your site, you can't control what data it collects. It may capture more information than you’ve agreed to, such as users’ PII, potentially violating your privacy policy or GDPR. You can control the data sent to the affiliate network with server-side tracking.
With server-side tracking, you can track all conversions from affiliates. This brings two key benefits:
Learn why server-side affiliate tracking is crucial and follow our step-by-step guide to set up Google Tag Manager affiliate tracking for conversion tracking.
In this article you will find out how to start conversion tracking on Shopify upsell page with server Google Tag Manager and get additional income generated by upsells and have as accurate tracking as possible.
Learn about Enhanced Conversions in Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads: what they are, tracking setup guide, usage tips, key benefits, and common questions answered.
