What is Affiliate Cookie Duration?

[SpaceBOT]

There are various ways to track affiliate referred sales and the most common is to use cookies (information bits stored by your browser when you're surfing websites).

When a user clicks on your affiliate links, a bit of information is stored on their computer (cookie), and when that user ends up at the merchant's site and buys something, that same cookie is passed back to the affiliate tracking software (or, affiliate network), and registers an affiliate commissionable sale.

Cookie Duration

How long affiliates receive credit for a sale after the initial click is determined by cookie duration. This means that if a visitor clicks through an affiliate link but doesn’t purchase anything at the merchant site, and then comes back later you will still earn money for the sale. Obviously, the longer the cookie duration lasts the better for affiliates.

So, when a merchant says they would store a cookie for a period of 30 days, it basically means that from the time of the referred click to the time of the customer check-out, you have 30 customer return days to earn a commission. After which, you no longer earn any commission when that visitor visits the merchants site.

Make sense? Look for merchants with longer cookie duration and you'll earn more!

For example, if a merchant has an un-expiring cookie (it may stay on the computer for years), you'll continue to earn a commission when that customers returns to buy a product long after they have clicked on your link.

[x-man]

Hi Cool! . Quite an interesting post...I have some few questions about cookies...can you help me out?

1. Why do merchants need to set cookie duration to a certain specified time period? Is longer cookie duration benefecial to merchants? affiliate networks?

2. What happens when a cookie expired on its "way" to merchant's landing page or network's site?

3. What's the shortest cookie duration? longest?

[mini_0]

I think longer is the better but they are always over ridden by the last referrer . How long affiliates receive credit for a sale after the initial click is determined by cookie duration. This means that if a visitor clicks through an affiliate link but doesn’t purchase anything at the merchant site, and then comes back later you will still earn money for the sale. Obviously, the longer the cookie duration lasts the better for affiliates.The data from these cookies is collected and automatically analyzed by affiliate program software and I think using a good software might help .