I noticed the default for ccbill's affiliate cookie is 3 days. That seems a little harsh to me. What is the "standard"? I was thinking 30 days. Is a longer cookie life a selling point? Do you even care? I think having a cookie expiration similar to the life expectancy of a twinkie is probably overkill.
Is it a closely guarded secret to set your affiliate program cookie expiration at 3 days and then snag all the bookmark signups without paying affiliates?
So many questions!
Well that sucks! I've actually been wondering about cookie duration with ccbill sites -- now i know.
I was under the impression the default for CCBill was 30 days?!?
Guess we need to change our to 3 days now on Condom Cash j/k
Regards,
Lee
some programs only give 24 hours. and i've noticed that some programs don't even know :-/
24 hours? Damn.Originally Posted by basschick
That being said, do you think i could get away with a 60 minute cookie?
Regards,
Lee
Ummm.. I wouldn't be kidding about something like that. I know I'm gonna be asking a lot of affiliate programs what their cookie lifespan is.do you think i could get away with a 60 minute cookie?
Lee
I think 3 days is to account for traffic coming from different affiliates, for instance, it would really suck if your gallery tempted the surfer enough to buy a membership but the guy who did a pop up on this same surfer 2 days earlier got the credit for it.
cheers,
Luke
I'm really surprised more affiliates haven't taken note of all the sponsors fucking around with affiliate cookies. It's another form of shaving and just as deadly as not counting signups, but since it's out in the open it's within the law. The real problem is that most webmasters don't even know how cookies work, so they are blind to this type of sponsor behavior.
CCBill does default to about 3 days, but they give the option of no cookies all the way up to cookies that expire in many months. Some die when the browser is closed.
Luke mentioned a short cookie duration to account for different affiliates traffic. This is not the case. All new CCBill affiliate cookies override existing cookies, and any affiliate system can do this.
I'm not going to post affiliate cookie durations for specific sponsors (and that's a real great thing for some of you who post here). The only thing I'll say is check things out yourself before promoting anyone, and check cookie duration every so often because it can change.
In FireFox, go to TOOLS > OPTIONS > COOKIES > VIEW COOKIES
It's easier if you clear the cookies before checking a site. For CCBill sites you are looking for the CCBill cookie with the sites ID number as the cookie name (or the only CCBill cookie if you cleared them). The NATS affiliate cookie is named "nats". Then look at the expiration at the bottom.
Also beware of sponsors who set an affiliate cookie for X time to please affiliates, but when the surfer does a typein to go back your cookie is replaced with their in-house cookie after they click Enter.
There is so much dishonesty in this industry from people you wouldn't expect, and cookies are one of the biggest problems as I'm sure some of you are about to find out.
I post here to whore this sig.
At Verotel it is also 3 days, only. So seems to be a kind of standard.
two things i wanted to note here:
1. i worked as a consultant for a str8 program with 5 sites that used NATS. we had not tons but a fair chunk (over 10%) of surfers who came back repeatedly before joining (weird because these sites didn't update). i'm talking 2 - 6 weeks, and in a few cases over 8 weeks.
2. how do you think pps programs pay $35 per sale? besides upsells, cross sales, and those guys who rebill for a year and a half, the no cookie guys and the returnees they don't pay for helps a lot. i'm not thrilled with pps, but i can live with it. but with revshare, it's not really fair...
a bit old topic, but it was just what I was searching for...
Does the cookie coming from my links overwrites previous cookies in all cases or am I also sending signups to some other affiliate code?
Thanks Matt 26z for the tip.
Very interesting
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