Getting an ROI through your PPC campaigns

PPC IQ say pre-loading, the networks say cookie stuffing...

Yep it's possible.

And I have kicked out many affiliates from my programs for doing it.

Another word for it is "fraud" and it's against the terms of service of almost every network.

It’s interesting, but how can we say it as "fraud"?
Any way good secret for the new user as well.

A Merchant basically pays affiliates to DRIVE customers to their website.

Would you be happy if YOUR affiliates were doing this?

By pre loading a cookie, you are not "driving" anything, you are just taking pot luck and STEALING a commission that you didn't earn (and perhaps stealing another affiliate's commission who DID do some preselling).

If this was a cool practice, Google.com could add a few billion in revenue simply by dumping cookies for every affiliate program on its user's computers. (Or any high trafficked site could do the same).

Do it if you want, but you WILL get kicked out of affiliate programs, you WILL be a thief, you WILL be making it harder for affiliate marketing to gain a mainsteam foothold.

Couple comments, Cookie stuffing is bad and not right on a mass spyware scale. Selective cookie loading is fine. On certain sites iframes are totally legit and a lot of affiliate programs agree. Drop pages or review sites might be selling the customers but if the customer already clicked through to a merchant and is doing research on a product etc why should they not get credit when in fact they are the ones selling the customer on the product?

I can think of a million examples and its not some black and white arguement. Its gray and lots of affiliate programs are fine with it within reason.

Anonymous - I have to respectfully and almost copmletely disagree.

I would challenge you to name the sites where you believe cookie stuffing is legit so we can test whether or not the respective merchant and network agree that it is kosher by asking them.

I am sure you could convince some merchants with a lack of technical or online marketing knowledge that it is legit, but anyone who has been in the game a while knows that 99% of the time, it is not.

Rob, I responded to your comment on your blog...

"Rob, I respect your opinion on this issue. I did first check with one of my biggest affiliate companies and this is the response I got, “Spoke to our CTO and on our end your iframe idea would probably work…” Just so you know that not all affiliate programs have a problem with it."

And if you ever release the name of that affiliate network, I guarantee that merchants and affiliates will start fleeing like rats from a sinking ship.

I know it works, Brandon.

The first time I came accross cookie stuffing (a few years back), it was when an irate merchant was screaming at me down the phone asking why the *&^$ he should have to pay a parasite on the network.

I didn't know what the hell he was talking about, so I looked at the affiliate, copied the source code of his page, did a few experiments etc etc. The guy was stuffing cookies for almost every relevant affiliate program on the network and half of them weren't even mentioned on his site.

The affiliate gave every excuse the in book. But in the end, nobody could see what value he was offering the merchants and he was removed from the program. The merchant's overall sales remained exactly the same. His overall profits increased because he wasn't paying affiliate fees to a parasite.

It sounds to me like you asked somebody at that network who had never heard of cookie stuffing as "would probably work" shows that they don't really understand what it is. (Exactly what happened to me the first time I heard of it).

A CTO is not the person to speak to either - try speaking to some merchants and explain what value you offer to their program and speak to some affiliates and explain how you are stealing their commissions.

Seriously Brandon, I love your blog and respect your opinions, but you have got this one so very seriously wrong.

...But if you use iframe for Pre-loading a cookie and the customer need to register or buy something, it's ok because you pay to bring the customer, on adwords for example, but for ppc it's simply stealing.

Not a cool thing to do

Great explanation of Cookie Stuffing!