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Question: How are affiliate link 'Clicks' recorded?
Answer: An affiliate link 'click' is recorded for each unique IP address that has clicked the affiliate link. If an customer clicks the affiliate link multiple times, it's only recorded for the first click through on the link. Also, some affiliate link, such as the 'Invisible' and 'Simple' links require a tracking script snippet in the landing page, in order to successfully track the click through. If the tracking script is not there or there is broken script in the page, the click through will not be recorded.
Question: How will the proposed phasing out of third party cookies affect my affiliate program?
Answer: The proposed changes will not affect the UltraCart Affiliate manage system, which uses "First Party" cookies.
First party cookies are not going anywhere. They are fundamental to the way the web works and it's impossible to get rid of those at this time. What has been substantially limited is third party cookies. Those are the kind used by Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. over the years to track everything about what a unique customer did that visited any site that contained their code. Apple has forced most of those restrictions with their ITP 2.0 initiative. So yes, Google has to come up with alternate ways of tracking your behavior and profiling you across the web, but that's more of an advertiser problem than anything else.
UltraCart on the other hand only uses first party cookies. We also implement IP+UserAgent backup tracking in case the browser don't accept the affiliate cookie. In addition to that we persist the affiliate information to the cart database record at our earliest opportunity. All of that functionality yields a very robust and effective affiliate tracking platform.