Transparency has long been a challenge in affiliate marketing — but as the industry matures, it's also becoming one of its greatest opportunities.
At the recent Affiliate Summit West conference in Las Vegas, measurement was a core topic across many of the key panels. It also was a central theme in Moonpull's mini-conference, titled "Tracking is a Team Sport".
It was a pleasure to host senior speakers from three leading global networks, CJ, impact.com and Awin, sharing their insights into their approaches to tracking and measurement.
The speakers were in agreement that tracking implementations underpin measurement accuracy, and in turn better data leads to better conversations between publishers and advertisers. Conversations can then focus on growth, and data points that help publishers become more aware of how they're helping to meet the brands' objectives for the channel.
Trust and Confidence in 2026
Moonpull CEO Steven Brown, Adam Ross (CEO, Awin) and Santi Pierini (CEO, CJ) shared a whistle-stop appraisal of how they are shaping their businesses and how they see the challenges and opportunities ahead.
Adam and Santi both explained the importance of both server tracking and their JavaScript tags as part of their suite of reporting tools. From a tracking perspective, they are just two methods of achieving the same goal of establishing a memory of the referral (typically in a cookie) on the user's device to be retrieved at the checkout.
From a measurement perspective, good measurement requires the tag on every page. Putting Moonpull's critical contribution into context — "Moonpull evaluates advertisers' measurement infrastructure as well as their tracking infrastructure. Thus Moonpull doesn't do the measurement, but ensures full datasets are present for the networks' analytics to provide reliable output on attribution and partner value reporting."
The Click Is Dead: Influence Is the Signal
Partnerize CEO Matt Gilbert tackled issues around click measurement: "if clicks are disappearing, influence needs a new way to be measured and rewarded. This is not just a search problem. It is a full funnel visibility problem."
Matt shared how Partnerize are dealing with this with their VantagePoint solution. The use of multi-source measurement provides additional capabilities for tech partners and attribution decisions.
Why JavaScript and Server Tracking?
When discussing measurement, many networks talk about the importance of brands implementing server-based tracking as their most robust tracking method. They also talk about the imperative of implementing their tags. So why both?
**Server-based tracking** usually has the benefit of mitigating much of the leakage from ad-blockers and is therefore certainly a good component of robust tracking implementations.
**Tags** are important for the measurement processes such as recording user journeys, identifying repeat visits and the initiation of third party tech on advertisers' sites. Tags provide enhanced datasets for better measurement-based decisions, including understanding the value of different partners and types of partner.
Dealing with Complexity
For affiliate management agencies, there has always been the issue of being at the nexus of the publisher relationship. They have to field publishers' queries on any tracking anomalies and pass them to advertisers often without full detail of how it happened.
In many cases now, agencies will have seen publishers passing through more detailed Moonpull reports to pinpoint the exact issue to be communicated to the brands' tech teams. This has meant that they can more effectively identify the issue and scope a potential solution more quickly.
Moonpull Agency Console
Following discussion with several leading agencies, Moonpull is launching a product for agencies to manage each of their clients' affiliate programs in their own Moonpull Agency Console.
Good Measurement Supports Better Reporting
For CMOs, understanding how affiliate reporting fits in with all the other measurements in place within their ecommerce setup has always been problematic. By having high quality affiliate metrics the differences of affiliate measurement to single-source analytics can be better articulated within a brand's marketing department.
Moonpull is proud to have been adopted by many leading organisations in the industry, at the heart of helping to improve measurement.
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