Brands can master the science of tracking with these four tools.

The world of Affiliate Marketing has become increasingly complex in recent years. Brands face an uptick in privacy and data regulation, an ongoing erosion of third-party cookie effectiveness and an ever-more fractured customer journey, spread across multiple devices, browsers, websites and apps.

Brand marketers don’t need to tackle these challenges single-handed, however. A recent CJ webinar, entitled Mastering Tracking Effectiveness, showcased the four most effective tools marketers can leverage to cut through the complexity, maximise affiliate campaign success and stay ahead of the curve.

Tool 1: Universal Tag

What is it? The Universal Tag (UT) is a powerful tracking tool that provides brand marketers with a real-time, comprehensive view of their affiliate marketing performance. By capturing data instantly, UT helps brands adjust their strategies and optimise campaigns at speed for better results.

Webinar takeaway:
“The universal tag, UT, is more than just a tag. It’s a powerful suite of solutions. First, it enhances tracking on restricted browsers, bypasses link decoration limitations, and reduces ad blocker impacts.” – Chloé Dorbes, Solution Director, EMEA at CJ

The benefits: A key advantage of UT is its ability to track customer interactions even in restricted environments. With increasing privacy regulations, browser limitations, and ad blockers, traditional tracking can be unreliable. UT overcomes these challenges by storing data in multiple ways, such as cookies, local storage, and server-side tracking. This approach ensures key insights are always captured.

Deeper dive: Beyond conversions, UT helps brands capture key customer touchpoints, providing a more complete view of the journey. This enables brand marketers to accurately measure the effectiveness of their channels and partners.

The UT used by CJ is seamlessly integrated into CJ’s systems, automatically adapting to industry changes without the need for manual updates. It is also connected to a range of marketing tools, support cross-platform tracking and ensure accurate attribution across devices and campaigns.

In a nutshell: By simplifying data collection, enhancing visibility, and improving marketing performance, UT helps brands navigate the complex modern marketing landscape with confidence.

Listen to the webinar and find out more.

Tool 2: Reverse Proxy

What is it? A reverse proxy is essentially a kind of digital intermediary, set up by a brand to manage the flow of requests between their website and the users accessing it. They can future-proof online affiliate marketing by:

• Preserving data reliability. It enables the setting of first-party, server-side HTTP cookies and ensure robust tracking despite tightening browser restrictions. This makes attribution efforts more reliable.
• Mitigating the impact of ad blockers: It can prevent ad blockers from targeting essential tracking tags, ensuring more complete data for analysis.
• Maintaining control and security: Implementing a reverse proxy doesn't sacrifice data control. The brand retains oversight, ensuring transparency and security.

Webinar takeaway:
“Think of the reverse proxy as your digital middleman. It takes a request from the router, fetches info from another server, and returns it. Why is that crucial? It allows the universal tag to store event ID server-side on your domain. This ensures cookies last as long as fine wine and aren’t swayed by browser changes.” Chloé Dorbes, Solution Director, EMEA at CJ

In a nutshell: Increasing demands for consumer privacy create new challenges for brand marketers. Reverse proxies, however, over a strong solution for maintaining data reliability, achieving compliance and securing future marketing measurement.

Tool 3: In-app tracking and cross-channel measurement

What are they? These capabilities are crucial for understanding how customers engage with brands across different platforms, particularly as mobile apps continue to dominate online shopping.

More consumers are interacting with brands via apps, because they are faster to navigate, store payment details and offer personalsed recommendations. This means marketers need new ways to accurately track customers to capture their full journey and optimise affiliate marketing campaign performance.

Are they essential? Without in-app tracking, businesses risk gaps in attribution, leading to an incomplete understanding of which marketing efforts drive conversions. A campaign might encourage a user to download an app, but if purchases made within the app aren’t tracked, the impact of that campaign goes unrecognised. This results in missed opportunities for optimisation and inefficient budget allocation.

By integrating cross-channel measurement, however, brand marketers gain a holistic view of customer interactions across mobile apps, websites, and other digital touchpoints. This enables more effective attribution, helping businesses recognise how different channels contribute to conversions. It also ensures consistent messaging and engagement, which improves customer experience and long-term retention.

Webinar takeaway:
“Without this accurate tracking, there’s a risk of gaining a skewed view of your company’s effectiveness, missing the full customer journey, and losing out on growth opportunities.” Chloé Dorbes, Solution Director, EMEA at CJ

In a nutshell: In-app tracking and cross-channel measurement bridge the gap between mobile and web, allowing brands to track performance more accurately, make data-driven decisions, and maximise their marketing ROI in an increasingly app-driven world.

Tool 4: Loyalty Exemption

What is it? Loyalty exemption is based on CJ’s interpretation of the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR), which states that consent to place cookies/similar technologies is not required where it is deemed strictly necessary.  Cashback and loyalty schemes fall into this category because users actively participate in these programs to earn rewards. So, CJ can facilitate the placement of cookies in a way that allows brands to track loyalty and cashback transactions without requiring explicit user consent for cookies.

What are the benefits? Loyalty exemption achieves three things:

• For brands: It ensures accurate attribution of transactions, even when users decline cookies—preventing 20–40% data loss and preserving campaign performance insights.
• For users: It guarantees that they receive the rewards or cashback they’ve actively requested, even without cookie consent.
• For publishers: It secures fair compensation for their role in driving conversions and protecting their revenue.

Webinar takeaway:
“Loyalty exemption enables brand marketers to tackle the challenges of tracking and consent in our privacy-centric world, enabling advertisers to maintain accurate measurement for loyalty publishers while ensuring compliance with GDPR and other global privacy regulations.” Chloé Dorbes, Solution Director, EMEA at CJ

In a nutshell: Without this exemption, many loyalty-based transactions would go untracked, impacting brand’s ability to measure success and allocate marketing budgets efficiently. Loyalty Exemption provides a privacy-compliant way to track and reward customer activity while maintaining accurate marketing insights.

Final thought. As the digital landscape continues to evolve, brands must stay ahead of tracking challenges to maintain accurate measurement and optimize their affiliate marketing strategies. Tools such as universal tag, reverse proxy, in-app tracking, and loyalty exemption are not just technical enhancements, they are essential solutions for navigating privacy regulations, browser restrictions, and shifting consumer behaviour.

Discover how to master tracking effectiveness.
Listen to CJ’s webinar now.