Not completely, in fact there isn’t an other way to track our return sales apart cookies. The diagrams show well that if cookies are deleted, which is something that is going to happen more a more often, then you have lots of chance to lose a sale.
I compiled a list of suggestion that can help to get the affiliate tracking more robust against anti-spywares, or at list more efficient to get our sales more tracked – it can lead a natural increase with our conversions (and those are our sales):
SUGGESTIONS TO “COUNTER” THE PROBLEM: :shooter:
1. PUSH all affiliate programs to put our aff tags in ALL URLS of the casinos websites – for example like Casino Blasters casinos or Fortune Affiliates casinos. This will help with return bookmarks. Some are doing this only with the homepage, and for some the affiliate tag never appears in the urls, for example lots of PlayTechs.
2. PUSH major online casino affiliate programs to get in touch with the major anti-spyware companies (at least Adaware and SpyBot) to have, at least, their affiliate tracking cookies removed from deletion (if some haven’t already done that). Those cookies are NOT harmful for the visitor, they are not infringing the privacy – they have a simple purpose, rewarding a sale to an affiliate. So I am sure those companies won’t have any concerns for excludind those cookies from deletion.
3. I am not sure if this one can be efficient. I understand lots of webmasters don’t want to annoy people with cookies stories. But if you have articles about anti-spywares, then explain to your visitors to don’t delete cookies, because for them it can make the loss of their login information in casinos. In simply two lines you can at least tell that cookies are not harmful and help THEIR interests. Not doing garbage or “alerting”. Just be sure that you run these two lines at the beginning of your articles.
4. To follow bb1webs’ suggestion. But I am not sure on how we can do this or if casinos will be OK. We should point out an interest for the casinos to help us with this. IMO, they can also “warn” customers to don’t delete cookies because customers will lose their login information. It can be inserted on the login page of each major casino software, under the “Remember my password” option. One line.
5. We, or at least I, have to do a study about cookies. We can test something. Delete all cookies, visit a group of casinos through aff tags. Then run adaware/spybot, and see which are removed. We can compile a list of this. Each one can do that for for example 5 casinos and let me know the results. This way I won’t have to do this for all online casinos myself. If someone is OK then let me know which ones you plan to test. I want also to study the efficacity of the tracking if cookies are deleted at two different levels of a purchase (before download and after download).