How To Fix Affiliate Tracking in 2024

Too much tracking does not work properly right now – there’s no argument about that. Publishers aren’t being compensated fairly. With the onset of third-party cookie deprecation, these complications are only going to get worse. So, how do we fix it?

This was the question that some of the UK’s top publishers set out to answer at Moonpull’s roundtable event in London last week.

As we all know, Google is phasing out third-party cookies. The latest timeline says that they will be switched off for 1% of users worldwide by the end of Q1 next year. Towards the end of 2024, Google plans to eradicate third-party cookies for all Chrome users. 

These plans haven’t sprung out of nowhere. The initial announcement dates all the way back to 2020. Since then, numerous voices in the affiliate world – and wider digital landscape – have been beating the drum for first-party data, urging advertisers, networks, and affiliates to ensure an alternative strategy is in place and ready for the cookie crunch.

However, despite repeated warnings and ample time to act on them, we’ve still seen statistics saying 68% of brand-side marketers do not have first-party data strategies in place, as recently as January of this year.