Since the release of Internet Explorer a few years ago, third party cookie handling has slowly become more restrictive with the default security settings in Internet Explorer.
With the release of IE 8, you may have noticed that many of your affiliate links may not be giving you credit for your referrals.
I’ve noticed around the net that many affiliates have a rough time getting conversions on their products.
There’s many reasons that this can happen, & only testing can pinpoint the problem, but if your affiliate network is using third-party cookies to credit your referrals, then you may be losing sales because Internet Explorer is blocking them on your prospect’s computer.
Internet Explorer has been ramping up their safety features in each release, and IE8 will block any third-party cookies by default unless the website has a p3p privacy policy in effect.
In semi-English, this means that the original source of the cookie would have to have a p3p header reference in their web page to a compact privacy policy with another one pointing to an XML file which outlines the actual human readable privacy policy, which you also need.
If the browser determines that it is legit enough, it will allow the cookie to be set. Yeah, I know… that’s a real mouthful just to process an affiliate link.
Most product creators using their own affiliate software that rely on this type of tracking, aren’t up on the importance of a compact privacy policy, along with all the other techno-bs that goes along with it.
Fortunately, Clickbank, which is one of the most popular affiliate networks for digital products uses 1st party cookies, and are not affected. As far as I can tell, your referrals are pretty safe with them on this point.
If you’re using a link cloaker, this is much more significant, and there is a good chance that your affiliate cookies are not getting set because of this. Some link cloakers have been rendered useless, costing you precious commissions from your visitors who use Internet Explorer & Safari especially.
I suppose that you can always hope that every one of your visitors use Firefox.
…Or you can use a better tool that will get around this issue. AmazingCloaker just happens to have the feature built-in that will get around the whole third-party cookie issue.
I created AmazingCloaker because I was tired of getting shafted out of my commissions by link hi-jackers, link bypassers, & people who just plain didn’t like affiliates.
Now with Internet Explorer complicating things, I find that AmazingCloaker is more important than ever for keeping a level playing field for the affiliate.
If you’re an affiliate marketer and you don’t care whether or not you’re receiving everything that you deserve, then I would recommend that you continue on with your routine and enjoy the bliss of your ignorance.
If, on the other hand, you’re tired of working twice as hard and getting half as much, then you can check out AmazingCloaker here:
Your cloaker sounds great, as I am new to affiliate marketing. I use wordpress hosted on hostgator, how would I know what type to use, html, php etc. I believe hostgator accepts both files. I am not a techie, and I appreciate your response, I would like to order the product, just do not know what to specify as to type.
thanks
Paul
Hi Paul,
With Hostgator, you can use either type. For unframed cloaking, PHP is normally the choice as opposed to ASP which is a windows based scripting language, and not used as much by affiliate marketers.
.html & .htm, of course is the standard that will work on any website. You can use them for the framed type pages, which makes the vendor product page appear to be part of your own site. 🙂
You can also download the help manual which is freely available here for more info:
http://www.amazingcloaker.com/AmazingCloaker_help.pdf
Thanks for stopping by Paul. 🙂
-Jack