The 2025 Affiliate Summit West was one of the most engaging conferences in recent years based on feedback from the many posts we saw on LinkedIn. From our own perspective, it was good to hear that the US affiliate market was acknowledging the need to focus on tracking and in particular the growing effect of user consent on the affiliate model.
The Moonpull team had three key takeaways from the conference:
- There is an awareness that publishers, agencies and advertisers need to understand tracking to keep the affiliate model working for all partners - User consent is an important issue for US marketers - Network leaders believe that publishers have more power than they think to influence advertisers to fix tracking
Consent and Tracking — We Need to Talk
We started off ASW25 on Sunday afternoon in a mini-conference at Caesars Forum — "Consent and Tracking — we need to talk".
The Moonpull team invited leading figures in the industry to hear from a panel with Jim Nichols of Exclamation, Charlie Calabrese of AIM and Moonpull CEO Steven Brown, moderated by Jade Mayberry, of Dentsu and a PMA board member.
The panel reflected on the importance of tracking accuracy in a world where CMOs are comparing affiliate to other marketing channels — where the affiliate part may be only 8% overall. When a proportion of this is impacted by user consent and tracking issues, even in part, this makes the affiliate part potentially less compelling — particularly when affiliate reporting is up against other metrics such as GA4.
Charlie stressed "affiliate is super clean — so on tracking, as an industry collectively we have a responsibility to be as accurate as possible".
He added, "Every one of you in this room that is not sure about the importance of first party data or the importance of consent, you're missing the boat".
Jim commented "A lot of times I think because affiliate often gets managed in a silo separate from the rest of the organization, affiliate interests never become part of the discussion".
"I do believe this is a big opportunity for affiliate people; we are often seen as tangential to the rest of marketing. But if you're the one who knows about measurement, you can make sure that it becomes something that's at the center of marketing".
We again thank the sponsors for the mini-conference, Awin, CJ, Partnerize and Affiliate Summit for their support.
User Consent is Eating Our Lunch
Steven Brown was also involved at ASW moderating the Tuesday keynote panel "User Consent is Eating our Lunch". He posed questions around the issue of user consent in the USA market to leading network figures, Santi Pierini of CJ, David Lloyd of Awin and Garth Harris of CAKE.
User consent is a less understood part of the challenges facing the affiliate sector in the USA and it is clearly an issue people want to address, as this was one of the most attended sessions at the conference.
One reason it may be less understood is because there is no over-arching legislation like GDPR in Europe. However as Santi Pierini said, "California Consumer Protection Act — has broadly been implemented across The States, so it's kind of become the GDPR equivalent for the US". So while it doesn't apply to every state, many advertisers adopt the least risky legal status, and so implement consent requirements for the whole US.
Steven Brown confirmed that of the leading US based advertisers examined only a small proportion did not display a consent platform.
Key Quotes
> "According to what we've seen, affiliate marketing affected by consent could be as high as 30%, 50% of traffic — 30% in the US, 50% in Europe — but again it's affected traffic, not necessarily completely blocked" > — Santi Pierini of CJ
> "We typically see upwards of 15% impacted by consent. But if we look at tracking overall, it's actually a bigger number — there could be anywhere between 10 and 50% of sales not tracking." > — David Lloyd of Awin
> "So if we can't track well, then attribution doesn't happen and as David said, then our industry kind of falls apart because the whole thing is based on the ability to do attribution at the affiliate level. If the affiliate doesn't get paid, then the value of the overall thing goes down" > — Garth Harris of CAKE
> "Don't just think about consent, think about tracking. I do think advertisers and publishers should have at least one person in their business who really, really gets tracking." > — David Lloyd of Awin
> "CMOs should understand how the affiliate model amplifies the effect of all the other marketing channels. We're the one channel that really understands what's going on through the whole marketing mix, can help with customer journey analytics in ways that search is not encouraged — or incentivized — to tell you that the other channels are doing well" > — Santi Pierini of CJ
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