Recently in digital point forum. I came accross this thread about cookies. A user was asking few questions about affiliate cookies. I was first to answer his queries, and also received rep for my answer. This prompt me to write an article on affiliate cookies.

There are many misconception about cookies are in circulation. Many people belives that cookies are like worm or viruses, some treat them as spyware etc. However cookies are important part of web development and many websites can not function properly without cookie support.

Affiliate marketing has become one of the important form of intenet marketing and almost every merchant are using affiliate marketing to market their products, cookies also play important role in affiliate marketing. All affiliate networks and merchant use cookies to track the sales or lead generated by affiliates.

Whenever I join any affiliate program one of the thing which I look is cookie duration, i.e. for how much time cookie will remain in the visitor browser the longer is better. When a user click the affiliate URL a cookie is dropped in the visitor computer this cookie remain in his computer for a pre define period after that period cookie expired. If visitor does not purchase the product on first visit but purchase the product after revisitng the site before expiring the cookie, affiliate get the commission. So longer the cookie duration, it is better for affiliate.

Suppose you are promoting a program with cookie duration of 90 days. if you sent 100 visitors to merchant site and generated 1 sale. There are chance that you may get some more sale because of the cookie dropped in the visitors browser. Even if you stopped promoting merchant you may get some sales because of cookies. Cookies are like pipline for affiliates, the more cookies you dropped there are more sales for you in pipeline.

Cookies is the only method through which network or merchant track sales. There are some users around 1% does not enable cookie, therefore sale generated by these visitors are not tracked and affiliates did not get commission also some people have habits of deleting cookies because of some misconception this also result in sales not tracked and affiliate failed to get commission, however these number are very less.

Shareasale network gives a special return day analysis tool, this tool tells how much sales are generated on same day and how much sale are generated by returning visitors.

ashok

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