Cookies are small text files stored in your browser that contain data related to your visit to a particular website. Cookies are frequently used to help personalize a user’s browsing experience, keep a user logged in to the website, or to save a user’s shopping cart contents across several site visits.

First-party cookies are cookies set by the actual site that you are visiting; these cookies are usually vital and used for the purposes mentioned above. Third-party cookies, on the other hand, are cookies placed on the website you’re visiting by other websites via JavaScript. As an example, if you visit apples.com, pears.com may set cookies on apple.com to remember information about your site visit or browsing session.

No, Refersion does not use any type of cookies for tracking conversions.

When a customer visits your site with an affiliate link (e.g. apples.com?rfsn=123456.0000), we record a click in our system for the affiliate identified by that unique link. Data relating to the affiliate and that specific click of their link is stored in the local storage of the customer’s browser. A unique cart ID related to the customer’s shopping session is also added to the click data, which allows Refersion to identify this click later when the customer completes their purchase. The cart ID in the click data is matched to the cart ID in the order data to create a conversion.

With Safari’s latest Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP), third-party cookies are blocked by default, which prevents other sites from tracking information about your website visits across the web.

Since Refersion’s tracking utilizes first-party storage techniques and does not rely on accessing data across domains, Refersion’s tracking is unaffected by ITP 2.0.

This means that a website visitor should never see a popup like the image below asking to allow cookies for Refersion, as no cross-domain tracking is happening.

Additionally, Refersion runs tracking tests continuously using Safari Technology Previews, and our tracking scripts are not currently classified as ‘tracker’ scripts.

The newest form of ITP (Intelligent Tracking Prevention) implements a limit of 7 days on cookies that are set in HTTP responses or through the ‘document.cookie’ API. Refersion does not use cookies set in the HTTP response or through the ‘document.cookie’ API for tracking clicks or conversions. As such, Refersion’s tracking is unaffected by ITP 2.1.