Affiliate marketing is a growing performance-based marketing arrangement in which affiliates are rewarded for getting users to register, purchase, or visit a shopping website. This marketing strategy is valued at $18.5 billion USD for 2025. Deal-sharing platforms take advantage of this marketing strategy by acting as storefronts for sellers that showcase promotions and deals. As the service is free to use, they earn commissions through affiliate links when they lead to sales.

We perform an in-depth, end-to-end study of the tracking techniques leveraged by Pepper and its extended environment, a key player in deal-sharing platforms. Through a systematic 1-month crawl, we analyze the tracking ecosystem of 10 deal-sharing websites active in a diverse range of countries abiding by different privacy laws. Our analysis reveals that a significant part of the tracking occurs during redirect chains between the deal-sharing platform and the shopping website. We quantify the tracking-specific use of cookies, CNAME cloaking, and link decorations within redirect chains. We find that 67.9% of redirect chains leverage at least one of these additional tracking techniques. We show that redirect chains examined in prior work (limited to HTTP-based redirects) are significantly more constrained than those observed in our study (HTTP-, HTML-, and JS-based), which enable more aggressive behavior by dynamically loading additional tracking resources at runtime. Finally, by analyzing the ecosystem of third-party services and the privacy policies of deal-sharing websites, we reveal the omission of numerous actors involved in redirect chains.

Metadata

• Published in: ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB)
• DOI: 10.1145/3774944
• Source code: Zenodo