Doubleclick + affiliate links, after Apple's ITP

[londrum]

So here's the deal: I completely removed Adsense from my site a while ago and replaced them all with affiliate ads served through google's doubleclick. Prior to that I just had text links for my affiliate sales, but now i've got text links plus an extra 400,000 impressions from the image ads. My text links always did okay, so I was obviously expecting my earnings to go up quite a lot, but it's actually been a lot less than i was hoping.

I've been doing some reading and i've come across the big hoo-haa caused by Apple's ITP. apparently their new policy is messing with advertiser's affiliate cookies. they only last for a maximum of 24 hours now, regardless of what the advertiser sets them as, and I think i'm right in saying that if you send an affiliate link through doubleclick first then it's even worse - they won't set the cookie at all.
have i got that right?

So i'm wondering if anyone has managed to get their head around it all yet.
would the results improve if i hard-coded the affiliate ad links directly onto my page, without sending them through a third-party like doubleclick first?
i don't sell ad space on my site, so removing doubleclick would be a pain, but not the end of the world.

the more i read up on it, the more i'm thinking that sending affiliate links through doubleclick is a bad idea.

edit: i've just found some information from a big affiliate program which confirms doubleclick might have problems: tradedoubler.com/en/global-blog/itp-2-readiness/

[JesterMagic]

Interested in this and how it affects other affiliate companies like Commission Junction.

[JesterMagic]

This explains ITP 2.0 pretty good. [junction.cj.com...]

Basically "when a user visits a Publisher’s website and clicks on a CJ link, the user is briefly redirected through a CJ tracking domain before ultimately landing on the Advertiser’s site.". If a cookie is dropped by the CJ tracking domain it then cannot be read by the advertisers site with a browser that supports ITP 2.0. CJ itself (and many others) has cookieless tracking solutions which the advertiser needs to support to work around this issue.

From my understanding If the advertiser itself drops a cookie then that should not be a problem since when a sale or lead happens, they themselves would read it. ITP 2.0 at it's basic only allows domains to read their own cookies, not other domains cookies.

[londrum]

but what happens when you insert doubleclick into that as well. then you'll have an extra one in the chain

i read something else this morning which said apple doesn't allow any cookies to be dropped from a URL which is just a pure redirect, ie. the doubleclick ones, and the affiliate network ones. not even for 24 hours.

i think im going to play it safe and remove doubleclick from the chain, and see if that improves things.

[RhinoFish]

All of the Affiliate Networks are putting out ITP 2.0 tracking upgrade documents, and once the merchant adapts, then 1st party merchant cookies are used to track things (or other methods not impacted by ITP).

So ask your merchants if they are ITP 2.0 compliant.