Insight of the Month: Can Optimal Affiliate Tracking Boost Your Performance?
Written by Alfie Staples on 9 minute read
Tracking upgrades will help futureproof your affiliate programme, but can they also help you perform better?
Effective tracking is imperative to the success of any affiliate programme. It keeps everything running smoothly, ensuring every click and conversion is recorded, and affiliates are properly compensated for what they deliver.
Beyond ensuring publishers aren’t losing sales, optimal tracking benefits advertisers by helping them better understand their affiliate activity. The power of that transparency is one of the main inspirations behind our upcoming Conversion Protection Initiative (CPI) and the subsequent upgrading of tracking standards across all Awin programmes.
We’re confident that better tracking will produce the insight to drive advertiser performance, but as always, quantification is key.
Do advertisers with optimal tracking perform better than those without? Do they have better relationships with publishers? If both are true, how many of your competitors have these advantages?
It’s Insight of the Month time.
Action required as third-party cookie usage increases in early 2025
One aspect of upgrading your affiliate tracking might involve switching from third party to server-to-server tracking (S2S). This sees your data passed directly to Awin rather than through a third party, like with third-party cookies.
You might also require mobile app tracking to accurately measure affiliate contributions to your transactional app.
To give you an idea of how significant these changes are, since announcing the CPI in October 2024, Awin has seen more than 300 advertisers upgrade their tracking setups, leading to over 600,000 sales, £46 million in revenue, and £2.7 million in affiliate commission being recorded.
Without the upgrades, these sizeable contributions would not have been accurately tracked.
On the other side of the fence, we have ad blocker usage, data collection restrictions from device manufacturers, and intervention from browsers leading to fewer and fewer third-party cookies being tracked.
If that wasn’t a cause for concern, Google’s indecision over the future of third-party cookies on its Chrome browser (trusted by 67% of web users) has accelerated the need for affiliate marketing to futureproof itself through a switch to standards like S2S.
The quandary is that while the future of third-party cookies is unclear, data from January 2025 shows it still tracks a significant proportion of affiliate events on Google Chrome (22.2%) and Microsoft Edge (25.3%).
In fact, despite all the warning signs issued to advertisers last year, third-party cookies were used in even more events in January 2025 vs average 2024 levels across all browsers.
The case for S2S to replace third-party cookies is made stronger when considering the uplifts in accuracy.
On Awin’s previous tests on 150,000 affiliate tracking calls, advertisers with S2S saw a 12.6% increase in cookies.
We ran these findings by tech provider Stape, which gives Awin advertisers a simple way of upgrading their affiliate tracking to S2S by handling all aspects of the technical setup.
Views and analysis presented by Stape Founder Denis Golubovskyi support the notion that advertisers without S2S could be missing a huge chunk of contributions from their affiliate partners.
"We’ve analysed data from Awin users with Stape Analytics properly set up, along with average benchmarks from our broader user base.
“The key measurable benefit of server-side tracking is the average number of restored requests — basically, the additional traffic/events users see in GA4:
- Requests recovered from ad blockers: 8–12%
- Requests recovered from tracking prevention (ITP, browser restrictions): 25–30%
“For businesses, this means more complete and accurate data in reports, leading to better insights and smarter marketing optimisation/ads budget allocation."
Do advertisers with optimal affiliate tracking perform better?
We took our investigation one step further by studying the influence of optimal tracking on key performance metrics. If advertisers had a transparent view of their activities, they’d potentially make better decisions, leading to more sales and higher conversion rates, all at a lower cost.
To do this, we compared a cohort of Awin advertisers with poor tracking (no S2S or mobile app tracking implemented) against one with an optimal setup (S2S and mobile app tracking implemented).
Advertisers with an optimal setup had a strong 2024, increasing their sales by 8.3% and even growing their conversion rate by 9.6% despite industry-wide declines.
Compared to advertisers with poor tracking, they had a higher ROI (13.8 vs 12.5), a higher earning per click (4.0 vs 2.9), and a lower CPA (7.3% vs 8.0%). 
How soon can you use all the extra events to fine-tune your strategy? Well, tracking the conversion rates of a random advertiser sample following S2S implementation, we can see a clear uplift in performance after 30 days. 
Tracking upgrades aren’t a magic pill for your affiliate programme. However, quality tracking does seem to be a commonality among higher-performing advertisers.
For an instant uplift, we’d advise optimising your relationships with publishers, which brings us onto our next focus area.
Tracking now influencing publisher preferences
On top of network intervention through initiatives like the CPI, advertisers should be mindful of the less-publicised steps affiliates are taking to insulate their businesses from tracking issues.
Over the last year, Awin has heard several stories of affiliates offering better opportunities to advertisers with optimal tracking in place.
Speaking on a panel marking the announcement of the CPI at PI Live, Andreas Andreou, Chief Revenue Officer at fintech publisher Zilch, reiterated the direct link between affiliate tracking and the company’s vision of eliminating the high cost of consumer credit.
In lieu of charging late fees to customers using its buy now, pay later service, Zilch has created an ad-funded model to subsidise the cost. That model relies on adequate tracking to be profitable. If its contributions aren’t tracked, Zilch makes up the shortfall.
As such, Zilch uses a ‘take rate’ to guide users towards advertisers that provide better outcomes for their pockets and its business.
“We actually aren’t too interested in the CPA… What we look at is the GMV [gross merchandise value] we’re sending to our brand, which we can track through our card data, and we look at the commission. Divide that by the other and it creates the take rate as opposed to the CPA.”
Andreas Andreou, Chief Revenue Officer, Zilch
If a brand has a strong take rate, Zilch offers low or no fees when its users shop with them, which enhances their appeal. If a brand has a low take rate, Zilch charges a fee, and even recommends customers shop with similar brands tracking with greater accuracy.
These decisions ultimately benefit the end user. Quality tracking funds the model that has saved UK consumers more than £500 million in late fees and interest via Zilch in the last four years.
To get an idea of how much of an uplift you could gain by tracking optimally on Zilch, we followed up with Andreas for a story.
“Pizza Brand A didn’t have app-to-app tracking. It tracked around 35% of events and a 3x CPA increase would have been needed to give Zilch the take rate needed to remove fees, unlocking incremental GMV and market share for the brand.
“In the interest of CPA efficiencies and accurate reporting, Zilch ingested its affiliate card data into the network to capture the ‘untracked’ GMV, at the existing CPA level, with no CPAi [cost per acquisition increase] required. As a result of the improved Zilch take rate, Pizza Brand A moved to no fee on Feb 3, 2025.
“Comparing transactions in the week before the changes were made, starting January 27, 2025, to the very first week they came into play, starting February 3, the stats show:
- Transactions: +289%
- GMV: +269%
“The no-fee competitive advantage and exposure, featured marketing and Zilch transactional data-driven targeted marketing has created an immediate exponential impact to core KPIs, GMV, and transactional growth, at a ROAS [return on ad spend] of 20:1.”
That’s the uplift for one publisher. How many more are taking a less public stance on the same topic?
Is optimal affiliate tracking giving your competitors an edge?
If advertisers with better tracking have the insight and relationships to optimise their programmes, you’re right to be concerned about how many of your competitors sit in this camp.
If you’re a Department Store, a FMCG brand (fast-moving consumer goods), or a Home & Garden retailer, judging by their implementation of S2S, that’s half of the brands in your sub-sector.
The proportion of advertisers with S2S is much lower in Shoes (34%), Womenswear (39%), and Electronics (39%), where advertisers that upgrade their tracking could gain a competitive advantage.
CPI tees affiliate up for future growth
We’ve talked about the impact of improved affiliate tracking on Awin’s advertisers. Now let’s talk about what tracking all these extra events can do for our industry.
According to the latest APMA data, affiliate marketing drives almost one million sales per day in the UK alone, accounting for 10% of all retail transactions, producing an average ROI of 17:1. We at Awin could not be more excited to see just how high these numbers will go in a post-CPI world.
Speaking on the Awin-Win Marketing Podcast regarding the industry-wide gains of improved tracking, affiliate marketing expert Sarah Bundy summed up the level of change that advertisers could inspire.
“Anything that can really emphasise the accuracy and transparency and protection of data is something everybody in this industry can get behind. This is such a data-driven industry and without the ability for people to share information, facts, and stats, nothing will work the way it should and has the potential to.
“The fact that Awin puts so much time and emphasis, not only on quality partnerships, but the best and most accurate tracking that’s available, is going to help everyone in the industry propel forward in the best possible way.”
