Mozilla VPN Affiliate Attribution

The affiliate attribution flow for the Mozilla VPN landing page comprises an integration between the Commission Junction (CJ) affiliate marketing event system, bedrock, and the VPN product team’s CJ micro service (CJMS). For a more detailed breakdown you can view the full flow diagram, but at a high level the logic that bedrock is responsible for is as follows:

  1. On page load, bedrock looks for a cjevent query parameter in the page URL.

  2. If found, we validate the query param value and then POST it together with a Firefox Account flow_id to the CJMS.

  3. The CJMS responds with an affiliate marketing ID and expiry time, which we then set as a first-party cookie. This cookie is used to maintain a relationship between the cjevent value and an individual flow_id, so that successful subscriptions can be properly attributed to CJ.

  4. If a website visitor later returns to the landing page with an affiliate marketing cookie already set, then we update the flow_id and cjevent value (if a new one exists) via PUT on their repeat visit. This ensures that the most recent CJ referral is attributed if/when someone decides to purchase a subscription.

  5. The CJMS then responds with an updated ID / expiry time for the affiliate marketing cookie.

  6. To facilitate an opt-out of attribution, we display a cookie notification with an opt-out button at the top of the landing page when the flow initiates.

  7. If someone clicks “Reject” to opt-out, we generate a new flow_id (invalidating the existing flow_id in the CJMS database) and then delete the affiliate marketing cookie, replacing it with a “reject” preference cookie that will prevent attribution from initiating on repeat visits. This preference cookie will expire after 1 month.

  8. If someone clicks “OK” or closes the opt-out notification by clicking the “X” icon, here we assume the website visitor is OK with attribution. We set an “accept” preference cookie that will prevent displaying the opt-out notification on future visits (again with a 1 month expiry) and allow attribution to flow.

Note

To query what version of CJMS is currently deployed at the endpoint bedrock points to, you can add __version__ at the end of the base URL to see the release number and commit hash. For example: https://stage.cjms.nonprod.cloudops.mozgcp.net/__version__