How do you handle consent for affiliate cookies?
Quick one for anyone running an affiliate or referral programme in the EU.
Standard trackers set a cookie to remember which partner sent a visitor. Under ePrivacy that counts as a tracking cookie, so it technically needs consent before it fires — which means every declined banner is a referral you can't attribute.
How are you handling it in practice?
Show the consent banner and accept the attribution loss?
Track server-side so there's no cookie to consent to?
Not worrying about it (genuinely curious if that's the common answer)?
Something else?
Trying to get a read on what founders actually do here versus what the rule says. We went the server-side route building our own tool, but I don't think there's a single right answer.
What's your setup?
I like that you're framing this as an attribution tradeoff instead of a compliance problem.
The interesting decision isn't just "how do we stay compliant?"—it's how much attribution accuracy you're willing to sacrifice for user trust. Those are two different optimization goals, and treating them separately leads to much clearer product decisions.
Yeah, that's the split I keep coming back to. Once you name them as two goals instead of one "compliance" bucket, the decision gets honest: it becomes a point you pick on a curve.
Where do you draw it in practice? Do you set an explicit number (we'll accept losing X% of attribution to skip the banner), or does it stay a gut call? The teams I've seen write that number down argue about it way less later.
That's a good question.
I don't think I'd answer it with a fixed percentage, because I think the right point depends on the business and what it's actually optimizing for.
I'd rather explain how I'd think through that tradeoff in the context of your product than reduce it to a generic rule.
If you're open to it, what's the best email to reach you on?
Fair, there's no universal number, it does depend on what the business is optimising for. Happy to keep it in the thread though, that's kind of the point of the post, and anyone else weighing the same call gets the benefit too.
What are the two or three things you'd actually weigh to place that point? That's the part worth writing down in public.
That's a fair request.
The reason I'm hesitant is that I don't think the weighting exists independently of the product. The same framework would lead to different answers for different businesses, which is why I'm reluctant to turn it into a general checklist.
I'd rather leave it there than pretend there's a universal rule.
Fair enough, and I think you're right that it doesn't generalise into a checklist. For what it's worth, the one factor that's moved it most for us: how much of the buying decision happens off-site (newsletter, YouTube, word of mouth) versus on the landing page. The more it happens off-site, the more a declined banner actually costs you, so the case for going cookieless gets stronger. Thanks for thinking it through, good thread.