Now that I am driving more and more traffic to landing pages, blogs, and sites, I decided to take a look and my analytics reports, I use IndexTools, to see what percentage of the people visiting my sites have cookies disabled. For the first quarter of 2006, 13.33% of the visitors to my sites had cookies disabled.

Assuming that the people with cookies enabled and disabled convert at the same rate, that means that 13% of the sales I am generating are probably not being tracked.

A recent report in Web Services Magazine indicates that of the 25 percent of searchers that purchased an item directly related to their search query, of these buyers only 37% completed their purchase online, the remaining 63% of the sales happened offline.

Clearly there is a large portion of revenues being created by affiliates that are benefiting the merchant advertisers but not showing up in commission reports, or the company calculations of the value of their affiliate marketing channel.

Additionally, companies may be under-estimating the value of their own internet marketing efforts if their tracking tools are relying on cookies to track performance.

I wonder how many marginally unprofitable campaigns I have shut down over the years that might have been salvaged if the true value of the campaigns were being tracked and compensated.

Any ideas how this could be resolved?