What is session hijacking?

In marketing terms, session hijacking is when an ad campaign or partner takes sales credit for a purchase that was driven from an upper funnel event.

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Let’s go through an example:

Your customer hears about your brand on her favorite podcast (shoutout Armchair Expert!)
She then visits your website to checkout your product catalog
She likes your products, but ends up leaving your website after a few clicks
Later on, she sees your branded ads on Instagram
She google searches your brand, visits your website and adds a product to her cart
And then finally, right as she is about to buy…
Honey (an automatic coupon and cash back chrome extension) auto-fires a coupon code into her cart

This decreases your margins and now the affiliate publisher (Honey) takes unwarranted sales credit that your Podcast and Instagram marketing efforts drove.

How to find session hijacking within your marketing channels?

Some form of session hijacking can be found in almost every paid marketing channel.

A quick way to find session hijackers in your media mix is to make a list of your ad channels and dig into where the majority of your in-platform conversions are aggregating (as shown within the Meta, Google Ads, Impact, etc. ad accounts) .

If your conversion volume overly indexes on very low in the funnel campaigns (> 40%), then you may have non-incremental campaigns stealing sales credit from your upper funnel tactics.

This becomes a problem when you are trying to understand which upper funnel tactics actually drove the interest and sale down funnel.

The common bottom feeders to look out for include:

Affiliate publishers with large loyalty, coupon or cash back payouts (Honey, Capital One Shopping, Rakuten, Retailmenot, etc)
Paid social accounts that skew heavily towards website retargeting audiences
Search accounts with a high percentage of budget allocated towards branded search terms

Another way to find the session hijackers is to pull ad performance down by partner, sort each by total spend, and look for the combination of low cost-per-acquistion (CPA) and high cost per visitor or cost-per-click (CPC).

This combination is usally a sign that a channel is:

Not driving a ton of top of funnel awareness
Taking unwarranted sales credit in last click attribution models

Here’s an example of what that may look like:

You should be skeptical of partners like Honey, Capital one and Rakuten in this example.

If you see unusually high cost / visitor numbers compared to your other paid channels, but very low CPA’s, then they are claiming credit for a sale that they may not have had a large role in driving.

The case for leaving affiliate publishers alone

Your affiliate agency will tell you that there will be a negative conversion rate (CVR) impact from pausing or decreasing payouts on your coupon and loyalty partners.

This is a valid concern, but remember that affiliate agencies often get paid on a percentage of revenue and they are incentivized to make the in-platform metrics (what you see in Impact or your affiliate tracking tool) look as good as possible.

They are naturally less concerned about what is driving incremental orders for your business than you are.

One way to mitigate this is to create website funnel reports using a tool like Amplitude and measure what happens to your add to cart and purchase rate metrics pre vs post change.

Every business is different, but I’ve seen little to no impact in add to cart and purchase rate metrics after pausing payouts on some of the bottom feeders like Rakuten and Honey. For us, this resulted in a drop in affiliate CPA’s (cost-per-acquisition) and healthier topline metrics.

How to stop session hijacking from happening?

The move to pause low CPA campaigns according to the in-platform metrics found in Meta, Google ads, Impact, etc. can be scary, but if you are noticing very low traffic volumes at high cost/visit numbers, then they deserve a second look.

My recommendation would be to take one channel at a time and measure the impact of pausing campaigns, reducing budgets or pulling back commission payouts on campaigns and partners that seem to be particpating in session hijacking.

Remember, those usually have the combination of low CPA + high cost / visit.

Then, measure and see what happens to your top line metrics – the actual orders that you see in your Shopify/Big Commerce account.

If your top line metrics remain stable after pausing one of your session hijacking campaigns, then congrats!

You can now use that saved money on more upper funnel tactics that actually drive your business forward. Or, simply absorb that cost savings into improving your bottom line.

Test ideas to remove low value ad campaigns and partners

Here are a few test ideas as you think through ways to claw back your margins and focus your ad budgets on more upper funnel, incremental campaigns.

Pause or decrease commission payouts on coupon and cash back partners in your affiliate program
1. These include partners such Honey, Rakuten, Retailmenot, etc. and IMO they are the worst offenders in the session hijacking bunch.
2. You can do this one partner at a time and measure your website funnel metrics to see if the changes impact add-to-cart or conversion rate metrics.
  1. We use Amplitude for this kind of analysis
Audit all of your live coupon codes
1. You should assume all of your coupon codes are going to get leaked and used by the affiliate partners mentioned above.
2. You may find a high usage discount code or two that you thought expired that is racking up some hefty volumes and unknowningly decreasing your margins.
Implement a multi-touch attribution (MTA) tool like Triple Whale or Northbeam to give you a more accurate view of your ad campaigns
1. This is a must if you have more than 2x ad channels running.
2. We prefer Northbeam, but any third party tool is worth exploring to at least give you an unbiased view of campaign performance
Reduce your retargeting ad spend as percentage of total % of budget
1. My hypothesis is that most brands over invest in retargeting campaigns because the in platform CPA’s (cost per acquisition) look better than the upper funnel/prospecting campaigns.
2. Unfortunately, hitting your customer with their 10th Instagram ad is not going to move the needle for your brand and you can probably claw back some savings by reducing the ad frequency there.

I hope this helps!!

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