Affiliates and cookie durations

[Mike_Mackin]

What is your idea of a reasonable cookie duration?
Why don't all merchants set the cookie for 5 years?

[lazerzubb]

Don't know much about cookies, but they may have to replace the exisiting one, and replace it's ID, so they will end up with huge amount of ID's from every Cookie that they replaced etc.

And would the data in a cookie 5 years ago be valuable today?

Who knows will there even be cookies in 5 years.

But sure i don't see the huge harm in it.
Just understands that this is the affiliate forum, not the tracking forum :)

Affiliate cookies are normally 30 days from what i have seen.

I Don't think the Publishers would allow to have a 5 year cookie duration, just think of the losses they would make!

[korkus2000]

I think 30 days is fine for low price items ($5 - $50) and leads. Higher price items need as long a duration as possible. If I am trying to convert $1000 items people need time to shop around and make a decision.

As far as 5 year duration, merchants don't have to do. The same reason a lot of merchants only use banners. They don't want to pay. If they could find a way out of paying they would. They want the branding and exposer. 5 years guarantees many more pay outs.

[Nick_W]

Yes, depends on the items....

If you're selling dog food, or are a particularly high converter then no cookie at all may be okay. Or certainly less than a week...

If you're selling high end jewellry, or kit cars or something - 3monts minimum

Nick

[Jonny]

The cookie duration is no matter at all. E.g. cj.com has an option on the merchants side which is:

cookie keep=on
or cookie keep=off

as default the off position is set. That means that you are only paid for the first initial sale. For all following sales the cookie ( remember it is another cookie than that cookie responsible for the cookie duration ) is deleted and you were not granted for any resale. So the cookie duration can be 5 years or 5 seconds, when the customer buy 1 item then the cooky is deleted.
Jonny

[Mike_Mackin]

hmmmmmm

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Jonny

[Go60Guy]

Mike - I believe that whether or not a merchant provides a cookie is stark evidence of the merchant's attitude toward affiliates. IMO, its almost axiomatic that the longer the cookie duration, the more committed the merchant is to cultivating affiliates as true partners in its marketing strategy, and the more supportive the merchant is toward affiliates.

I was sending roughly $30,000 in sales a month to a merchant who lowered the cookie from 45 days to one day. I switched most of that business over to a competitor who has a 45 day cookie, and was willing, I found, to cut a special deal.

You often hear from merchants something along these lines. "We find that with a 45 day cookie, only about 11% of sales are affected by the cookie. So, you, the affiliate, are only missing a small percentage of sales."

Good grief, on $30,000 that comes to $3,300 which, at say 8%, means losing $264 monthly, or $3,168 annually. No thanks, forget it.

Five year cookies? You bet. I'll probably want to get on board with that merchant assuming the product mix and other factors are to my liking. I'm working right now with a merchant offering a lifetime cookie. Hope that one works out.

[oilman]

the longer I'm in this affiliate game the more I lean towards longer cookies. I'm currently setting up a new deal that will set 1 year cookies with a current provider - of course with the way the deal is structured a one year cookie protects him as much as it protects me.

Another equally important issues that we may want to spin off in another thread is lifetime customer vs one time customer. Don't necessarily need cookies for it but a good backend system will track repeat sales back to their original salesman.

[Robber]

My take on cookies is that I think a longer cookie shows the affiliate manager is willing to offer a fairer deal. However, a five year cookie is probably not going to be around in 5 years time - there are only so many cookies a client can store on the machine - with the number of websites setting cookies these days, it probably wont be too long before your cookie slips off the bottom of the pile. That said, someone offering a 9999 day cookie would be much more appealing than someone offering a 15 day cookie (all other things being equal), since it shows more commitment to the affiliates. Either that or they no how the games works!