Cookie Stuffing
Cookie stuffing is a technique in which a user receives a third-party cookie from a website unrelated to that visited by the user. Most of the time this occurs without the user being aware of it. Affiliate activity needs to be adequately monitored to ensure that this activity isn’t occurring on the program.
Below are some activity that may be indicators of potential cookie stuffing:
- An abnormally high conversion rate - If a user is already looking for a particular merchant and the affiliate is dropping a cookie wherever possible can lead to conversion rates of anywhere up to 15% or more.
- An extremely low conversion rate - If an affiliate is dropping lots of cookies but these fail to turn into sales they could be applying a shotgun effect of widening their funnel of potential with little return.
- High conversion rate + poor quality site - If the site is of poor quality and the conversion rate is high, there is a high likelihood
What do I do if an affiliate is cooking stuffing?
Cookie stuffing is not allowed on our platform and is considered deceitful, dishonest, and unethical. It is rarely seen as Commission Factory screens each publisher manually and we also have automated detection of anomalies in place, however if you do discover that an affiliate is cookie stuffing on the program, you can report the activity directly via the Commission Factory Compliance reporting tool. In this section you can also remove the publisher from your account or contact them if you want to give them an opportunity to explain. This is then reported directly to our compliance team who will also investigate and take action as required.
For more guidance on compliance management, please read the full guide.