Thread: Detect Affiliate Cookie Blocking

Is there a method to detect if the cookies used by your affiliates are being blocked? I know that Spybot adds rules to both Internet Explorer and Firefox to block cookies from affiliates such as Commission Junction and Linkshare. I'm sure there are other ad-blocking programs that proactively block cookies.

Not sure how old this article is, there is no date given, but it has a big list of ad-blocking programs and which cookies they detect:

vinnylingham.com/specialreports/cookiedetections/#results

Then, consider this: Spybot has been downloaded 105,035,491 from download.com, 8,303,608 from pcworld.com, not to mention all the other download sites out there and safer-networking themselves. Makes one wonder just how many commissions CPA bloggers are losing.

Of course you can't prevent users from scanning their computers and manually deleting cookies. But, if you can detect that the affiliate cookies are being blocked and give the visitor a prompt, it could be just one less lost commission.

Does anyone use this type of cookie detection or know how this could be implemented?

I have contacted one of my affiliates and we are working on a solution for this. There is really no reason why harmless cookies should be labeled as malware.

Not all cookies are harmless.

I think that this type of thing has been affecting affiliate marketing for awhile now. I have read about this subject in different places over the past 6 months or so.

From what I have heard others say as well as from my own experience it seems like CJ publishers are really being hurt. I had been making 75 to 100 per month with CJ for a long time, but then my earnings dropped to 5 to 10 per month if I was lucky. At the same time I was sending even more traffic to their merchants. The AdSense continues to grow as well as another affiliate program I use (On the same sites and pages) but CJ dropped to nearly nothing.

At first I suspected that CJ was simply cheating me, but then I started reading about programs like Spybot and even anti-virus programs that were actually blocking cookies.

It is sort of funny. One person has software that blocks the cookies, another person doesn't have the software but they have a Trojan or virus that "changes" the cookies to steal you commissions, and every now and then a person with neither will generate a commission for you.

Needless to say I removed most of the CJ merchant ads from my sites and rarely even bother with logging in to check stats anymore.

In the end I don't know exactly what was/is happening with affiliate marketing and cookies, but I prefer granola bars. I definitely intend of researching and finding out as much as I can about this!