Affiliate Sign Up

45 Day Cookie

[austtr]

I have just signed up to try out my first affiliate deals. In one of the forms I saw a reference to the cookie and a 45 day life (I can't recall the exact words or which affiliate management co. )

Can anyone tell me the significance of that... is there some action I need to undertake to keep the account alive after 45 days?

Thanks

[oilman]

Usually what it means is when a potential customer follows an affiliate link from your site for the parent site they will be given a cookie that marks them as having come from your affiliate site. This cookie will last for 45 days. Essentially this will allow you to still get credit for the sale if they go back a couple weeks later and go directly to the parent site instead of following the link. There is nothing you can do to extend this period.

[bartek]

This probably means that you will be assigned credit for a visitor generated through your link if the purchase is made within 45 days.

[bartek]

I guess i don't type fast enough :)

[rcjordan]

Cookie duration is one of the big areas of "affiliate abuse" by merchants. Since so many of the transactions are not completed the first time you send traffic to the merchant site, merchants are able to turn what appears to be an affiliate program into a no-cost branding campaign by setting the cookie at just a few days. 45 days currently seems to be the industry standard for merchant programs. Unless a program is obviously tuned to convert the impulse purchase or registration, I'd be wary of anything less.

[rcjordan]

moved to Website Advertising -rcj

This relates to the cookie issue as well as the value of branding in web advertising

An analysis of the campaign determined that 47 percent of the response to the banners was indirect, and 53 percent was direct. "Indirect" refers to people who deliberately visited Just-Sites' properties after viewing a banner, and "direct" refers to click-throughs.
Sixty percent of indirect respondents arrived at the destination site within one day of having seen the banner. About 30 percent of the indirect responses came within half an hour. Forty percent of the indirect responses came within an hour, 90 percent came within a week, and 100 percent had come within 28 days

Banners work, after the fact [medialifemagazine.com]

[Bolotomus]

Wow! I wrote an affiliate system once and asked the management how long it should wait before the affiliate loses credit... I suggested 48 hours (seemed reasonable to me at the time) but they shuddered, said "NO how about 1 hour?" Seems like they were salivating at the possibility of not paying commissions. Not a good policy if you want affiliates to send you real traffic.

[rcjordan]

>Not a good policy if you want affiliates to send you real traffic.
>
Particularly now. Thanks largely to savvy guys like Drastic pointing out this hidden method for abuse [webmasterworld.com], at least two of the major affiliate networks have added program evaluation reports so that those merchants that -for whatever reason- have programs that do not convert are made known to the affiliate IF he/she spends a little time researching it.